Lecture 1 :

Hi a welcome welcome to the series which I hope will be an enjoyable experience for all
of us even in these distressing times in which we are we living I like to begin each
lecture with it with an epigraphic kind of quotation from a thinker that I'll be referring to
as we go and I'll try to signal those to you at the outset of each part so that you can use
them as kind of cues keep track about where we are the first epigraph comes from a
speech of Abraham Lincoln's that I'll be referring to speech in which he said fellow
citizens we cannot escape history and that is the epigraph for what I'm calling I hope not
too presumptuously the preamble to my series of lectures on the American dream
borrowing a phrase from the Constitution of the United States at first glance a series
of lectures on the American dream may seem to be incredibly far removed from
the painful dilemmas of contemporary politics but I submit that war in the Persian
Gulf and all the other difficulties we Americans face can neither be understood
nor coped with adequately apart from reflection on who we Americans are and
what we stand for as a people engaging in reflection of that kind moreover can
surely make us ask what about the American dream perplexing as it is the
present joins with the past and the future to make it especially fitting now that we
encounter the challenges and conflicts the pitfalls and promises contained in that
question while preparing and then rewriting these opening words as changing
events required I listened not only to newscasts but also to music by Aaron Copland
that well loved American composer who died at the age of 90 and 1990 the son of
Russian Jewish immigrants who fled anti-Semitism and pogroms Copeland took musical
training in France but it was American song and story that inspired him best his well-
known fanfare was for the common man is Appalachian Spring perhaps the hallmark of
American classical music drew from folksongs and the lovely Shaker hymn called the
gift to be simple those tunes and words the memories in hopes they contain are able to
keep moving us all the more because of Copeland's distinctive ways of invoking them
less familiar than those two pieces is another by Copeland that I especially love maybe
you know it to it is his 1942 Lincoln portrait among its rich echoes of Stephen Foster
melodies and American life are some of Abraham Lincoln's words themselves
Copeland's taxed makes many takes many of its quotations from Lincoln's second
annual message to Congress which was delivered on December 1, 1862 just a month
before the Emancipation Proclamation would declare freedom for all slaves in the areas
still in rebellion the federal authority Clinton's portrait paints Lincoln as a quiet and
melancholy man and yet it stresses that this this is what Abe Lincoln said the dogmas of
the quiet past Lincoln said are in adequate to the stormy present the occasion is piled
high with difficulty and we must rise to the occasion as our case is new so we must think
anew and we must distance all ourselves and then we shall save our country fellow
citizens said Lincoln we cannot escape history we of this Congress and this
administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves no personal significance or
insignificance can spare one or another of us the fiery trial through which we pass will
light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation we even we hear hold the
power and bear the responsibility in giving freedom to the slaves sadly can we assure
freedom to the free honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve we shall
nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of our when Abraham Lincoln wrote and
spoke words like those words as we shall see that are so much a part of the American
dream he more than fulfill the mandate set forth well over a century later by Annie
Dillard one of our best contemporary authors per 1990 book when I recommend heartily
to you called the writing life is about much more than writing what she has to say is
about thinking acting and even dreaming a writing life in short is about life and here is
what Kenny Dillard said right she says as if you were dying at the same time assume
you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients that is after all the case
what would you begin writing she asks if you knew you would die soon what can you
say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality what follows your thoughts in
mind can hardly be expected to match the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln or Annie
Dillard nonetheless and especially in this stormy present I hope that those thoughts will
be a response worthy of the best in the American dream by being worthy of Annie
Dillard's questions and Abraham Lincoln's insistence that we cannot escape history with
that introduction or preamble then we turn to the first lecture proper a consideration of
the American dream from its past to its future and here the epigraph following on the
one that I cited from Abraham Lincoln comes from a person less well known I'm sure an
American historian whose name was James trust low Adams he is a distant relation
of the Amos Adams family from early earlier in American history and the
statement that I have uplifted from one of Adams's book called one of his books
called the epic of the epic of America is simply this he says the epic loses all its
glory without the dream the epic loses all its glory without the dream in 1971 a
countercultural writer named Hunter S Thompson published a novel called fear
and loathing in Las Vegas it details the surrealistic romp of a Dr. Duke is the
character is called and his attorney blasting through the desert in a huge Chevy
convertible rented awful lot on the Sunset strip they eventually find themselves
somewhere on the northeast outskirts of Las Vegas zooming along Paradise
Road headed toward Boulder city they stopped at Terry's taco stand USA to find
their way let me explain it to you Dr. Duke's attorney tells the waitress let me write
it down just briefly if I can working for the American dream and we were told it
was somewhere in this area we were sent out here from San Francisco to look for
the American dream by a magazine to cover it the directions they get from the
taco stands waitress and cook whose name is Lou are none too clear but it
seems that in one of its manifestations the American dream may once have been
a discotheque known as the old psychiatrists club following those leaves Dr.
Duke and his attorney finally locate what's left of the place a huge slab of cracked
scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds writes Thompson the owner of
a gas station across the road said the place had burned down about three years
ago if we look for the American dream what will we find is the dream somewhere
in this area can anybody cover it is it cracked scorched federal tall weeds burn
down about three years ago such questions began to concern me about the same
time that Thompson Savage journey to the heart of the American dream as he
subtitled for your loathing in Las Vegas got underway in particular I had been
sent from California to Austria where I spent an interesting year interpreting
American literature and philosophy history and religion to students at the University
of Innsbruck this was a real hardship assignment as you can imagine to organize my
teaching there I began to reflect upon and study about the American dreams
diverse ingredients and variations which make it appropriate to speak not only
about the American dream but also about American dreams" as fascinating as
they are elusive those ideas have held my attention ever sense if you look for the
American dream or American dreams as ideas if not for the dream itself you will
find those concepts suggesting many themes in many places it is hard to cover
them all but instructive to try as I want to illustrate at the beginning of this series of
lectures my illustrations come from a collection I keep the collection consists of
references to or uses of the American dream idea in popular culture some years
ago for instance I was at up at the bar atop one of Tokyo's largest hotels that
evening the featured drink which contains large portions of Kentucky bourbon
was called the American dream more recently our refrigerators freezer at home
contains ice cream called American dream maybe some of you have seen this
this product comes in nine not so delicious flavors none of them containing
Kentucky bourbon but it is healthier than the drink in the Tokyo hotel the
promotion for this product claims that dreams do come true because this ice
cream if one can really call it that is cholesterol and 99% fat free why would a
potent alcoholic drink and fat-free ice cream linked with the American dream if
there is not sufficient food for thought in those relationships consider a few more
there is a new restaurant outside Atlanta Georgia called the American dream
diner I know about this because I have a network of friends who send me things
about the American dream and the friend in Atlanta sent me a newspaper story
about this new restaurant in Atlanta called the American dream diner it's a 50s
style eatery featuring nostalgia a soda fountain for Micah booths and tables neon
jukeboxes black-and-white tiled floors a mural of classic 50s automobiles and a
menu to match meanwhile a grocery store chain in Southern California designed
its paper bags with an anniversary proclamation that said celebrating 50 years of
the American dream nostalgia trips and anniversary celebrations particularly one
involving a grocery bag that can be empty as well as full could these artifacts
communicate something more significant about Americans and their dreams than
meets the eye at first glance keeping that question in mind consider some other
items from my American dream collection many of them come from popular
music Bruce Springsteen song born to run speaks about a runaway American
dream Jackson Browne's lyrics in a song called for America referred to the
nations shining dream and call for waking her up this time for Crosby stills Nash
and Young one song was not enough they produced an album called American
dream its title track repeats a chorus American dream American dream don't
know where things went wrong might have been when you were young and
strong Tracy Chapman echoes that sentiment in across the lines which speaks of race
riots that kill the dream of America more upbeat are the Oak Ridge boys whose fans
include Pres. George Bush apparently inspired by his January 1989 presidential
inaugural they mashed Crosby stills Nash and Young by producing a record called
American dreams its jacket notes that the music expresses gratitude to a country where
if you follow your dreams and work hard the opportunities to succeed in life are
therefore you no matter who you are the Oak Ridge boys rendition of the song they call
the American dream starts back in 1952 when you could take a walk downtown without
being afraid the song goes on to acknowledge trouble on the other side of town
because everybody wants their share of the American dream but then the chorus urges
optimistically dream on children dream on don't let anybody tell you the dream is gone
keep on dreaming the American dream voicing dissent another group called the indigo
girls the duo whose star is rising American dream style find the sentiments of the Oak
Ridge boys too sentimental one of their recent songs sounds ironic tones about true
believers in the American dream I hope it's getting clear that references to the American
dream and popular culture are not one thing but many television and film reflect that
pattern to back in 1981 the American broadcasting Company made the American dream
into a weekly television drama focused on a fictional family in Chicago this season NBC
got into the back its comedy series American dreamer set in a rural Wisconsin town
takes up the life of newspaper columnist Tom Nash meanwhile Tom Brokaw presided
over a late 1990s series of American dream vignettes on NBC's nightly news dealing
with problems that contradict many versions of the dream those vignettes were hardly
comic but reflected instead what a late 1980s movie ironically titled promised land called
life on the edge of the American dream book titles carry a similar array of themes to
name just a few there are American dream global nightmare American dreams a study
of American utopias American dreams lost and found the American dream in the Great
Depression in search of the American dream the American dream and the national
game which is a book about baseball Mexican voices American dreams restoring the
American dream one title I discovered recently I like a lot called the Gospel and the
American dream advertising the American dream and songs of the doomed more notes
on the death of the American dream which is Hunter Thompson's latest follow-up to fear
and loathing in Las Vegas the American humorist Will Rogers once quipped that all I
know is what I read in the papers much may also be learned about the American dream
by watching the press for newspapers and magazines especially keep the term in print
a decade ago when the American team pulled a huge upset to win the ice hockey
competition at the Winter Olympics the Los Angeles times let off its story with big
headlines which said the American dream turns to gold sometime later the same paper
gave Dr. Jerry Buss who owns the Lakers and the cames out West a dream headline
that read the owner of a world championship team lives and American dream the parties
at half's place dines at great restaurants and dates beautiful young women not only the
times but time the magazine knows when to draw on the dream to it's November 5,
1990 issue featured excerpts from Ronald Reagan's book and American life the two-
page headline for the article simply said American dreamer as advertising the American
dream one of the previously mentioned book title suggests advertising capitalizes on the
idea to indeed is nearly as I've been able to determine the words American dream as
we see them these days originated in the early 20th century worlds of advertising and
public relations so it's not surprising that Las Vegas promoter some years ago named
musical review the great American dream billing at as the show that can make you rich
a while back another ad campaign announced that the American dream can happen for
you all you had to do was invest with Prudential base if you did then among other things
you could have that dream house you always wanted real estate agencies and banks
with mortgage loans to make those institutions appeal to the American dream probably
more than any others but the biggest print size and which I've ever seen the American
dream came from a different source for some time the Wall Street Journal healed itself
by contending that if the American dream has a diary this is it songs books magazines
advertisements they frequently use the American dream in ways that should make us
think but no item in my collection is more potent in that regard than the American dream
game the American dream as a game that is an idea worth pondering although Milton
Bradley's 1979 version is dated in more ways than one the game's goal for example is
probably too modest becoming a millionaire might not be sufficient to win the American
dream game today Decca millionaire if not billionaire status would be more like it to get
there a different gameboard would be needed as well the old game strategies of
investing in American Express United States steel Ford Motor Company and Kentucky
fried chicken would not be an adequate portfolio today's industry leaders are Toyota and
Honda not General Motors and Ford NEC and Toshiba not Texas Instruments and
Motorola not RCA and GE but Sony and Panasonic along with other rock artists
Madonna reported by a recent poll to be the woman American young people admire
most is one of the nation's best exports the American dream game did not anticipate
that either nor did it provide opportunities for leveraged buyouts and junk bonds any
more than its pitfalls included the bank failures S&L scandals and declining rates of
productivity that are so dismally commonplace in American life as the 1990s began the
world has changed a lot since the American dream game appeared when the 1980s
began for example the United States was an exporting nation now we are importing
nation we were the world's largest creditor nation we have become the world's largest
debtor nation we had the highest rate of productivity growth we have among the lowest
now the world's largest financial institutions were largely American presently they are
largely Japanese not only were the Japanese not so strong back then there were two
German states not one as its accompanying success book a kind of instruction manual
testifies the American dream game is a salute to our American free enterprise system
which affords us all opportunity apparently however this salute was received less well
than the folks at Milton Bradley hoped I must own one of the few existing copies for
almost as soon as it appeared the American dream game disappeared from the market
if a different fate lies in store for the American economy which is so important to the
dream Americans in the early 1990s have plenty of reasons to be concerned but they
might lose their next turn which is what happens in the American dream team when a
roll of the dice makes you land on squares marked worry doubt or fear the United States
may not be in many respects nearly so exceptional as it has at times believed itself to
be nevertheless literary critic Lionel Trilling's remark is worth contemplating the United
States he once observed is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its
name to one so watch for more examples of the sort I have been sharing with you and
please send them along for my collection if you locate any if you do so you will almost
certainly find what my illustrations have been indicating namely that few turns are used
more ambiguously and teasingly few terms are bandied about more loosely defined or
undefined in so many different ways then the American dream to some people the
dream is part of an ideology that snares and deludes deceptively tantalizing the have-
nots with hope while legitimating the halves was self-congratulation for their self-reliant
initiative on this view the dream riddled with irony becomes if not a joke an object of
criticism satire derision or even contempt at times it gets portrayed as a made in
America label for congeries of shamanistic clichés mouth by jingoist like the orator in the
1926 Poland by e.e. cummings which begins next to of course God America I love you
land of the Pilgrims and so forth to others the American dream merely signifies self-
determined success wealth acquisition and consumption of the latest things touted by
Madison Avenue in a word the good life of gentlemen's quarterly and house beautiful
Forbes Fortune and Vanity Fair and to still others less scornful disillusioned or frivolous
it denotes a distinctive set of social and moral ideals perhaps the American dream
means all of these things at once and they collide in clash within our psyches individual
and collective a game board and a Springsteen song snatches from Crosby stills Nash
and Young in a grocery sack critical reminders from Tracy Chapman and indigo girls to
go with optimistic courses from the Oak Ridge boys Prudential beige and the Wall
Street Journal in some samples from popular culture we've glimpsed a few images of
the American dream all of them might make us wonder about its past present in future
now add to those images some reflections of a different but related, no people and no
dream what have become American without a place of their own nor would any place
have become American without people who dreamed the vistas of a nation in land that
is now the United States persons dreams and places conceive each other today we
know that national borders slice the globe typically we take such boundaries for granted
forgetting how recently they have become dominant within our planets landscape
although men and women are territorial creatures human life is itself a newcomer on the
cosmic scene today people think of themselves as Chinese or French Russian Mexican
or American but there was a time when such distinctions were nonexistent millennia
passed before those identities and their distinctive political loyalties evolved nor have
those identities and loyalties stayed the same becoming is inescapable and constant
dust to dust ashes to ashes once born each of us will perish in time most of us
disappear without a trace but what of the life we share by having a nation that we call
our own Abraham Lincoln thought that a nation maybe said to consist of its territory its
people and its laws much political rhetoric the Lincolns rarely if at all tries to reassure us
that our nation will surely thrive indefinitely perhaps even forever those promises
resonate because so much that we hold dear dustpan on the national life of which we
are part on closer inspection however such hopes may be ill-founded think about what
is happened recently in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union current events around the
world drive home the point nations to common goal usually they are victims of conflict
produced by their own particularity that particularity concatenation against nation it can
also intensified internal civil strife by pitting group against group in ways that break
bonds to establish old ones to reestablish old ones or to bring new ones into existence
history some contend demonstrates that national pride waste life we must concentrate
they say on transcending national differences such advice seems apt in the 1990s when
xenophobic nationalism reasserts itself in many quarters destructive differences do
need to be over, especially now that more and more governments have nuclear
capabilities but at least in the foreseeable future is it realistic to think that nations will
wither away or even surrender their sovereignty to some higher power contingent
though they may be national identities and characteristics are facts of life even if we can
transcend their destructive features we ought not to assume that national loyalties will
dissolve of their own accord for assuming such an outcome were possible its desirability
the questionable cultural diversity nurtured through the world's many national traditions
can be of great value what is needed is a less utopian more sobering yet profoundly
idealistic view it would seek to build warranted pride and national identities that not only
serve one's own people but also help to meet the needs of all persons share because
they are human although nationhood nationality and nationalism can all be immensely
dangerous and may all be destined ultimately for oblivion to their future is not ours to
know completely in advance making the best of what we have is our lot instead for
millions of persons in the late 20th century that goal requires coming to terms with the
lives they lead on American ground how Americans cope with their national identity in
turn affects the feet of the earth the 19th-century novelist Henry James once observed
it's a complex faith be an American Kris Kristofferson a contemporary American
songwriter might've had that thought in mind in his description of an American pilgrim as
he calls it could be called a walking contradiction partly truth and partly fiction and if that
great American poet Robert Frost had been asked how an American's fate is
complicated by truth and fiction contained in the nation he might have answered by
quoting the lines he recited one January day just 30 years ago in 1961 nearly 90 frost
favored John Kennedy's inaugural with verse when he was about to read the poem you
prepared for that occasion the Washington wind gust of the lines from his view instead
frost presented from memory a poem he had written 20 years before the gift outright as
it was called reminded American people first that the land was ours before we were the
lands the American dream is unthinkable without the land yet the land is a chief
ingredient that renders an American fate complex because how people think about and
use American ground puts them at odds created by no man or woman the land was
indeed a gift outright soon enough though it became a gift of another kind the land was
there for the taking taken it was to long before it was called American the territory was
home for hundreds of very tribal cultures that European immigrants came to
know indiscriminately as Indian the land granted visions of promise economic
political religious but apparently not space enough to satisfy the mall if this land is your
land this land is my land is Woody Guthrie's alternative national anthem puts it yours
and mine have excluded and in many cases shattered the word the ways of those now
called needy Americans Robert Frost words and dissonant notes to Woody Guthrie's
course this land was made for you and me by remembering that the deed of gift was
many teams of war nonetheless the land in a word meant possibility reality may be
frustrating disappointing even crushing but the lure of possibility seemed able to
transcend all of that so restless European immigrants their overseas bags and Overland
trunks packed with hope entered what Frost called the land vaguely realizing westward
inexorably they would occupy the grand reserving little for the Native Americans except
the Trail of tears even then the land was not the immigrants what they found was
strange if not unmapped the new space was so distant from what they left behind its
future as uncertain as it was unknown their home remained there not here complicated
by the lands problematic development included enslavement as well as a quality
oppression as well as opportunity destruction as well as democracy possibility was a
fickle friend so it is and shall remain frost: the gift outright called the land on storied
artless unenhanced but it was hardly that for the Native Americans who witnessed
European colonization and its aftermath but for those who comparatively speaking were
newcomers by choice or by compulsion and also for the vast majority of us who trace
our roots to their rivals the land would be less than all her land of living as Frost called it
until the irony of being in it was discovered that irony consisted of the incongruent he
that grew when people intended one thing and unintentionally produced another which
still happens as often as not the newcomers many of them as Frost says still colonials
would create and tell stories about the land enhance it with arts and crafts while thinking
that the United States was such as she was Americans old and new would discover that
this place was becoming sometimes worse than we knew sometimes better than we
thought such becoming would have much to do and still does with the American dream
only as all Americans newcomers and knees alike learn how not to withhold from each
other discovering in the process that American ground has been storied artful an
enhanced in countless ways unnoticed will the land be truly need for you and me and
become more fully hours as a blessing than as a curse yet the complexity of our fate as
Americans is that our capacity to give ourselves outright remains in question as it
records a renewing relationship between a father and the son Robert Persing's widely
read 1975 book Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance illustrates why that
hampered capacity is the case by providing an autobiographical parable about caring in
fact as Chris and his dad bike there way toward each other it is clear that their journey
within and across American ground also involves coming to grips with possibility and
irony Percy says his concern is less with what's new and more with what's best his
meditations of survey the land and its spirit traveling with spare parts and instruction
books on motorcycle repair he doesn't want to get stranded were caught unprepared if
you can help it which is not always possible and yet ironically it occurred to me rights
person there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance
the most important aspect of all caring about what you are doing is either considered
unimportant or taken for granted in that environment motorcycles or hardware run by
fuel not by Fidelity sparked by plugs not my perseverance attitudes toward them are
inconsequential no fiction of course could be further from the truth and that is person's
point turn the motorcycle into yourself your country your world and the lesson is made
the more vital and the more difficult pour the books and Chris asks if he can have his
own motorcycle someday person tells the boy he can if you will take care of Chris is
questioning continues what we have to do will his father showing will those things be
hard Chris's father replies of course he will help and show his son and what needs to be
done won't be so hard at least as person puts it not if you have the right attitude it's
having the right attitudes that hard Chris's father expresses confidence that his son will
have the right attitude indeed a San Francisco Bay looms ahead person concludes trials
never end of course unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people
live but there is a feeling now that was not here before and is not just on the surface of
things but penetrates all the way through we've wanted it's going to get better now you
can sort of tell these things less than five years after Robert Persing still popular
narrative appeared the San Francisco Chronicle carried a story about his family the 23-
year-old son of the author of Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance its lead
paragraph announced was stabbed to death Saturday night two blocks from the Zen
Center where he lived police said yesterday the article continued by noting that the
person family was scattered Chris Persico lived at the Zen Center since 1975 his
mother was in Minneapolis it was uncertain whether his father who was then living on a
boat off the English coast and writing about Zen and the art of sailing would be able to
attend the funeral being an American is a complex fate because trials do have a way of
never ending even when things seem to be getting better we Americans prefer of
course to dwell on success stories we thrive on hopes for the future to hence we are
partly truth but we are also partly fiction in so far as we slight the contradictory character
of our nation which both is and is not what it wants to be and could become American
ground is a scene of epic proportions it has that quality however not only because of
optimistic dreams and their accomplishments but also because adversity and failure
identify us from time to time ground together American-style those realities test our
metal they reveal our fundamental spirit scouting the land plotting its possibilities and
reckoning with the irony it contains visions and revisions of the American dream offer a
story to enhance the appreciation that are complex fate is worth having artful a gift to
share and possess with care while Thomas Jefferson and the others who signed the
declaration of independence could scarcely have foreseen all the implications of what
they said especially as far as women African-Americans and other marginalized
minorities were concerned they stated many of the dreams basic assumptions in 1776
when they took it to be self evident that all men are created equal that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty
and the pursuit of happiness in his letters from an American farmer Hector St. John
decrepit core enlarge this vision in 1782 by describing the new Republic as a place
where a man could abandon all his ancient prejudices and manners act upon new
principles and be rewarded by ample subsistence indeed to credit score the hopes that
the nation to be would constitute a new paradise were already virtually fulfilled America
he thought was the most perfect society now existing in the world as already noted
however the term American dream is probably of relatively recent coinage one of the
first writers to popularize it was the historian James Trussell Adams in 1931 he
published his often reprinted and widely read book the epic of America their Adams
contended that apart from the dream the glory of America's epic would be lost indeed he
believed this American dream was the greatest contribution the United States had as
yet made the thought and welfare of the world Adams summed up his vision by referring
to that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and Fuller for every
person with opportunity for each according to his or her ability or achievement Adams a
summation notwithstanding we have already seen that the contents of the American
dream are not simply identified let alone easily reconciled for the dream is and always
has been comprised of many dreams no single vision is ever totally dominated the
American imagination Abraham Lincoln knew as much in 1864 when he observed that
Americans all declare for liberty but in using the same word not all mean the same thing
Ralph Ellison's 1952 epic of America his now classic novel invisible man complements
Lincoln's point the unnamed narrator black like Ellison himself seeks to understand what
it means to be human American black and mail all it wants America he insists is woven
of many strands our fate is to become one and yet many this is not prophecy but
description echoing here the national motto e pluribus unum out of many one Ellison's
invisible Man not only expresses both the unity and the diversity of American society he
implicitly acknowledges the complex often paradoxical sometimes contradictory texture
of the dream that society has reflected and perpetuated the dreams diversity is
undeniable nevertheless that diversity exhibits major strands whose recurrent
interweaving's have given the dream subtle unity to none of those strands I think is
more persistent than a belief in new beginnings will hear the steam repeatedly as we go
this belief exemplifies better than any other the optimism some might call it the naïveté
of Americans and the fundamental reason why rhetoric about the dream caught on in
the United States from their inception most Americans self images have reflected the
idea that the past did not bind one irrevocably fresh starts could be made tomorrow
promised to be better than today and progress always seemed possible this strand
supports and has been strengthened by others including affirmation of the unalienable
rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence trust in the Constitution and a host
of other factors including the belief that the nation is dedicated to human equality justice
and freedom of choice but the speak of the American dream became one appealing
way to sum up the many principles and experiences that reinforce those hopes in
American life and yet Americans have not always found that it's easy to peace these
ideas together and to give the unity and coherence and to find a way to reconcile the
various strands and so sometimes the American dream has been lifted up as a set of
ideals and at other times it has been made a target for criticism for although Americans
with her famous or obscure extraordinary ordinary me cherish and want to believe in
their dreams they are also frequently skeptical even cynical about realizing them this is
been true all along probably because it's doubtful that any actuality could fully achieve
all the things that the American dream has held out as possibilities nonetheless James
Trussell Adams emphasized that the epic loses all its glory without the dream and in this
first lecture in the series we have tried to glimpse at least some of the contents that that
dream contains complicated and problematic as they are promising to finish up this first
lecture I want to tell you just about one more item from the collection of artifacts that I
keep it consists of a photograph which was taken for me last year by my wife man who
is an elementary school teacher one day a student of hers a six-year-old boy came to
class in a new jacket shiny white it had the word Corvette emblazoned across the front
on the left sleeve just below to checkered racing flags to signify victory were the words
American dream obviously proud of his handsome jacket the boy in the picture is
smiling his name is man he is the son of Vietnamese refugees a new white jacket an
American sports car checkered victory flags a refugee immigrant family a smiling child
the American dream what will happen to this little boy named Mia and the American
dream that brought him to the shores will a Corvette because American dream or
something more substantial and victorious than that answers to such questions are in
the making their quality depends on whether the nation can be what some of the early
immigrants in our history called the Commonwealth as we shall see in the lecture that
follows they spoke of a new Commonwealth that option may be ours no longer if it ever
was but to renew the bonds that can make us one people out of many is still possible
and vitally important history suggests what some of those bonds need to be and to that
aspect of the American dream.

Lecture 2:
Him in the title for the second lecture is a new Commonwealth to pick up on the theme
with which which we ended in the epigraph this time comes from an American poet
named Robert Lowell and in one of his poems these lines appear embarking from the
Netherlands of Holland pilgrims on household by Geneva's night they planted here
the serpents seeds of light how changed is the land its spirit and people because
the dreams of restless Europeans were enlarged by the discovery of a world new to
them depending on a belief in new beginnings those dreams did not originate in
America but often were sustained by a figurative America even before European
explorers mapped the coast and probe the interior his backers entranced by Oriental
wealth Christopher Columbus sought a passage to India nonetheless he imagined that
a new kingdom of God a terrestrial paradise might be established in the land to which is
navigational mistake had led him in his imaginings he thus resembled other and later
European dreamers who saw their fountain of youth their new Atlantis there there El
Dorado as existing somewhere in that Golden West which turned out to be America the
Atlantic was their frontier somewhere beyond which lay a place where people could
hope to start a new the hopes however were often dashed tribal and colonial interests
collided tensions streamed the transplanted European groups as aspirations for
personal gain conflicted with visions of communal association and if those tensions
were lacking the threats of disease and starvation in a supposed land of plenty were
never far away such gaps between dreams and realities persist the promised land of the
free now poignantly storied still shows the scars of its mocking ironies the experiences
of Alvar Nuñez composited vodka provide a fascinating case in point he was a Spanish
explorer from the 16th century in 1527 about eight years after Magellan set out to
circumnavigate the earth Cabeza the Vaca sailed from the same Spanish port Sonya
Dakar Dave Armada with an expedition of five ships and 600 men it would be 10 years
until he returned only one of four survivors from adventures in the unknown interior of
America as the English title of his journal so aptly calls his Odyssey hardly by choice
conveys a debacle's attempts to find his way home took him along the West Coast of
Florida across the river not yet known as the Mississippi on to what is today Galveston
Island and even onto New Mexico at one point his journal contains this remark I will not
prolong this unpleasantness he says but you can imagine what it would be like in a
strange remote land destitute of means either to remain or to get out turning south he
eventually got back to Spanish civilization in Mexico and eventually returned Spain
harsh though Cabeza debacles experiences had been his reports and those of other
early explorers intensified interest in that unknown interior of America like Cabeza
debacle many of the early voyageurs were Spanish others working mainly to the north
were French their cultural traditions Catholic religious practices in their language is not
only continue to mark the American scene but in some cases versions of them still
dominated neither France nor Spanish are really foreign languages in our society they
have been spoken here as long as English nevertheless the Protestantism of English-
speaking Puritans proved to be a more decisive influence those separatist Puritans the
pilgrims who arrived in 1620 were not the first of that persuasion to immigrate across
the sea other English-speaking settlement started the seaboard before the Mayflower
spied Cape Cod a landfall far from her Virginia destination still much of American history
is grounded on Plymouth Rock when the Pilgrims landed there however they hardly
found earthly paradise signer of the Mayflower compact historian of Plymouth plantation
its governor for more than 30 years William Bradford might have commiserated with
companies at the Vaca when he Bradford described their Massachusetts home to be as
a howling savage wilderness nevertheless here the pilgrims could practice their religion
unimpeded by pressures to tolerate or to conform to alien ways they would try to restore
Christianity the health which in the Puritans opinion it had lost in the old world by the
grace of God the Puritans claimed American ground offered the human race a chance
to begin a new as the Mayflower compact emphasizes the pilgrims efforts to glorify God
and to advance the Christian faith enjoined practical political planning sound economic
practice and shared responsibility for what they called the general good of the colony
hence the compact a covenant a voluntary agreement that established a community but
that covenant depended on another initiated and sustained by God as the Puritans
sought revealed in Scripture this prior covenant between God and humankind insisted
that the purpose of human life is to glorify God willful violation of God's expectations
which divine revelation and human reflection made clear could not occur with impunity
for those chosen ones who were faithfully obedient however God's promise of salvation
would not be broken Puritanism was not a single fixed ideology it was instead a far-
reaching reform movement with diverse and even conflicting tendencies but if the
Pilgrim separatists who established Plymouth plantation did not see eye to eye with
their less radical and more powerful cousins at Massachusetts Bay in every Puritan
community the sense of covenant expressed in the Mayflower compact carried
substantial weight as the Puritans conscience usually understood it their charge was to
combine ourselves together into a civil body politic is the language put it I think in the
Mayflower compact that would serve God by being an example for the rest of the world
a charge that many Americans have taken seriously if not successfully ever since no
one embodied the Puritan conscience better than John Winthrop who in 1630 lead a
group of colonists across the Atlantic in a ship called the Arbella and then went on to
govern the Massachusetts Bay colony for nearly 20 years Winthrop's dream was to
establish God's new Israel in the New World Massachusetts Bay he hoped would
become a true Commonwealth a community where civility economic prosperity and
religious purity sustained one another serving God this community would provide a
fulfilling life for its members as a model of Christian charity which is what Winthrop
called it it was to be a city upon a hill that would influence human destiny Austin aboard
the Arbella Winthrop gathered his followers together and spoke about these possibilities
stressing the bond of brotherly affection he reminded them that they had undertaken the
task by mutual consent progress toward their goals entailed a due form of government
both civil and ecclesiastical the details of such a government which are believed having
been entrusted to Puritan man by God somewhat later when trips colleague John cotton
for many years the most important teacher in the Massachusetts Bay colony
supplemented Puritan idealism with a realistic warning let all the world learn to give
mortal man no greater power than they are content they shall use he admonished for
use it they will rooted in a profound recognition of the human propensity to sin that
principle stood at the core of cotton's political philosophy without government individuals
will destroy each other but the remedy had to be watched to cotton thought lest it would
become deadly for the same qualities that make government necessary narrow self-
interest power grabbing unchecked desires that produce enslavement these things do
not disappear in the politically powerful a proper covenant therefore involves a contract
between the people and their governors one that finds the balance between authority
and liberty which the public good requires reality fell short of these Puritan dreams one
reason was that Winthrop and cotton could not sustain a consensus rooted in biblical
principles their plan failed partly because not everyone read God's word exactly alike
but also because many of the early arrivals did not read God's word at all only a minority
of the colonial settlers dreamed of spiritual renewal let alone of Christian charity hence
their understandings of the public good were varied if they thought of it all a covenant is
only as real as the shared understanding of its terms a community exists just to the
degree that people share values memories and hopes Puritan ways did not prevail
ironically partly because they helped to encourage the belief in the beginnings a
conviction that has been widely shared by Americans yet one that keeps them at odds
as much as it brings them together the United States was born after all of a bloody
revolution despite recurrent attempts to maintain or later to reinstate the Christian vision
through great awakenings of one sort or another the Puritans dream of new beginnings
was eventually transformed into more secular hopes of social political economic
psychological and even sexual rebirth Benjamin Franklin's thinking is a representative
early example of the process Franklin was perhaps the best known and best loved
American in the 18th century world he demonstrated unusual business skills help to pull
United States out of the fires of revolution and constitutional construction and carried
out diplomatic missions with flair and distinction inventions and scientific discoveries are
also to his credit he sustained libraries schools and philosophical societies as well
throughout the 18th century popular opinion was influenced by his writing and printing to
while paying lip service to God and virtue Franklin clearly had his eye on success as far
as one's fortune is concerned he says in his autobiography that nothing so much as
virtue is likely to make it that virtue is the means fortune and furthermore Franklin
advised changing from poor Richard to Rich Richard depends primarily not on divine
grace but on determination to help oneself Thomas Paine was equally disinclined to turn
over to God the responsibility for creating a new order illustrating the evolution of
religious Protestantism into the political rebelliousness that culminated in the American
Revolution pain asserted in 1776 that we have it in our power to begin the world over
again the amazing statement we have it in our power to begin the world over again his
efforts as a writer did much to build the revolutionary spirit that one independence thus
giving Americans a greater chance at least economically to practice what Benjamin
Franklin preached pain however saw the American cause not simply as a matter of
economic growth his passion to revive flagging spirits in the harsh winter of 17 7677
these are the times that try men's souls was based on his conviction that the
revolutionary cause was virtuous Americans not only had the right to rebel as a symbol
of promise it was their duty to do so in argued he saw the trying time of revolution not
nearly as an American struggle but as a human crisis in which basic questions about
freedom and tyranny would be decided pain used every argument he could imagine to
convince Americans that the revolutionary cause was favored it was expedient in accord
with divine will and geographically logical it was above all just and righteous because of
the hope that would emerge if people could break the shackles of hereditary rule to form
a new society based on a democratic compact honoring reason and conscience in
stating that the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind pain
saw the American struggle for independence as a fight to vindicate universal human
rights it is the pride of Kings P1 said which throws mankind into confusion but he did not
count on is that the American dream he helped to spawn as a similar potential for
justifiable pride in early American new beginnings as often twisted into the attitude that
whatever is good for the United States or thought to be so is good for everyone else it is
hard for Americans to think of their national interest as misplaced or mistaken just
because they so often presented to the world and to each other under the guise of
virtue nothing however guarantees a neat automatic fit between virtue and American
policy not every American men are now would endorse all the optimism that Thomas
Payne injected into the American dream for example writing his fiction several
generations later a descendent of New England Puritans named Nathaniel Hawthorne
battled unrelentingly against the assumption that there could be a new world totally
separable from the old rather as Hawthorne one of our greatest American writers
showed persons places and people's always have a past indeed their identity dissolves
unless they recognize that they are embedded in history Hawthorne concurred that the
revolution was necessary and right but has his brilliant short story my kinsman Maj.
Molineux bears witness Hawthorne also urged Americans to remember that their nation
grew in soil enriched by British blood America's rebellious new beginnings required a
form of parricide Hawthorne believed having fractured the temporal continuity upon
which identity personal or national is so heavily dependent Americans would struggle
ever after to cope with who they are in the main Hawthorne's point would've been
granted by Thomas Jefferson despite his defense of what he called the sovereignty of
the present for he opened the Declaration of Independence by arguing that the
dissolution of long-standing political bonds must not be taken lightly at the very least the
causes that impelled the separation must be stated publicly in other ways however
Jefferson's declaration carries forward the legacy of turmoil the Hawthorne took to be
the price of rupture from the past that legacy appears in the fact that the declaration of
independence epitomizes a philosophy not originally American but inspired by
European-based enlightenment the heart of this philosophy is a series of fundamental
concepts for example self evident truths unalienable rights the laws of nature equality
and happiness Jefferson Bank on a shared understanding of the meaning of those turn
although enough agreement existed that his declaration still informs American self
understanding the interpretation of those terms repeatedly divides us American ground
then is an arena in which the definitions of governing ideas are repeatedly in question if
that is as it should be the nation's life fortune and honor depend on the quality of that
debate Jefferson rightly holds a place second only to George Washington as the best
remembered figure of the nation's founding for if Washington is rightly called the father
of our country no one has better claim than Jefferson to be called the father of its dream
Jefferson's fatherhood like Washington's produced mixed results in Jefferson's case that
outcome still has much to do with a not so self-evident truth namely all men are created
equal never I think that a person right five more troublesome words about three months
before he signed a declaration that contain those words by Jefferson John Adams
would later become president of the United States was away from his Massachusetts
home on political business one day he received a letter from his wife Abigail I long to
hear that you have declared and independency she wrote him on March 31, 1776 and
by the way in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make
she went on I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and
favorable to them than your ancestors do not put such unlimited power into the hands of
the husbands she said remember all men would be tyrants if they could if particular care
and attention are not paid to the ladies we are determined to format a rebellion and will
not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice no representation
John Adams found Abigail saucy as he said in his letter back to her he made plain to
her that the man in charge knew better than to repeal are masculine system Jeffersons
all men create are created equal withstand as Mary P Ryan sums it up in her 1979
study womanhood in America women found no larger place in the politics of the new
nation than the head under the British Empire their name still remained absent from the
ledger of voters in the lists of officeholders neither the Declaration of Independence nor
the Constitution of the United States elevated women to the status of political yet as
Abigail Adams new women were not absent from the land and its possibilities what were
black slaves echoing Jeffersons paraphrasing even if they were not allowed to learn to
read it the slaves legitimate hope of being free as the escaped slave and abolitionist
leader Frederick Douglas called it let Jefferson to see the tragic conflict slavery caused
the irony as well as the hope in Jefferson's words would keep freedom ringing in
American years the huge difficulties and opportunities were created because Jefferson's
claim about equality remains full of ambiguities under the most optimal conditions you
might still be disagreement concerning the meaning of crucial terms such as men an
equal but conditions in America then or now are not optimal the status of women would
come to the fore but more immediately slavery was a massive obstacle compounded by
the fact that a physiological condition of the slaves lax skin color provided grounds
specious though they were for arguing that blacks should not be included under the
provisions of Jefferson's statement on the other hand some white Americans not to
mention the slaves themselves did think of blacks as fully human Jefferson himself
equivocated though sensing that slavery was wrong because it violated natural rights
and thereby quality itself he continued ownership of blacks even while advocating
emancipation we have the west by the ears he wrote in 1820 and we can either hold
him more safely let him go justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other
nothing could be more certain Jefferson believed in that the slaves would one day go
free it was no less certain he thought that the two races could never find peace in the
same government white prejudice and black memory would produce new provocations
without ceasing it remains to be seen whether the results will turn out better the
Jeffersons forecast but he remains correct the racial prejudice hatred and suspicion
divide Americans unnecessary to resolve prior to 18th-century unification Sheldon
compromise in order to make the original union possible the issue of slavery and
equality cannot be dodged forever it eventually turned into trial by fire it did not end with
Robert E Lee's surrender Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865 education
was at the top of Jefferson's list of priorities no other sure foundation can be devised he
said for the preservation of freedom and happiness ignorance is enslavement the right
to liberty and the pursuit of happiness may crucial the possibility of obtaining all the
education that is commensurate with individual interests and abilities and with society's
capacity to provide this important aspect of the American dream also part of Jefferson's
legacy suggests a basic equality not necessarily of ability or achievement but at least of
opportunity however what constitutes that equality indeed whether it can be achieved
even if we agree on its essence is another dynamite issue in spite of the diligence
present at the formation of the United States ideals that Americans accepted and the
subsequent interpretations of them have been anything but crystal clear perhaps
Americans thought that they meant the same thing when they did not or maybe they
recognize differences setting them aside long enough to accomplish a new a only to
have old problems surprise them at a later date the variations are endless in any case
the clock cannot be turned back to edit out all the conflict ridden references to equality
in America's political heritage even if that could be done it would surely be a
questionable gain to do so but I often think how simple it would've been if Jefferson had
never written the words all men are created equal as an element of the dream equality
leaves Americans in a Briarpatch strange to think that the pursuit of happiness leads or
even ends their but after all these tempestuous years it should come as no surprise that
Americans are destined to find their happiness only in the midst of a struggle over ideals
status and significance become clarified only by restless encounters among people who
are changing themselves e pluribus unum out of many wine is the motto of the United
States following the revolution however serious problems remained about the best ways
to create order from confusion as the 18th-century poet Philip for no with the point
politically opinion clashed over the distribution of power how much authority should be
centralized how much reserved to the several states and in either case what rights
would remain to individuals alone the Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in 1787
represented the culmination of the founders thinking on those issues and still enshrines
common attitudes toward government yet it was no foregone conclusion that 18th
century Americans would credit the Constitution's promise to ensure domestic tranquility
as the words in the preamble put it a series of arguments by Alexander Hamilton John
Jay and James Madison pseudonymously signed by probably us and collectively titled
the Federalist were especially influential in winning ratification for the new Constitution
none remains of greater importance than Federalist number 10 which James Madison
authored within reasons boundaries the founders collectively stressed human beings
could go far to make what they wanted of themselves their surroundings and institutions
for the God in whom Thomas Jefferson and his comrades believed was benevolent only
more insistently than most of those leaders Madison also realistically underscored that
human reason remains fallible that humankind self-love and unfriendly passions as he
called them may wreck the public good by what he also called the violence of faction but
the causes of factional rivalry argued Madison are inseparable from human liberty a
remedy that destroyed them therefore would be worse than the disease itself a sound
government contended Madison would limit the effects of factious spirit while
maintaining individual liberty through its division of powers its system of checks and
balances its ability to provide representation for a large and diverse populace the new
constitution seemed eminently structured to control those effects indeed Madison
argued it would be the best prevention against the formation of the worst threat of all
namely a majority faction whose pursuit of happiness would tyrannize those outside its
ranks however realistic Madisons analysis it also asserted a basic American optimism
for Madison assumed an affirmative answer to what remains a question where the one
in the many are concerned and the question could be put like this will a plurality of
factions in fact serve the good of all the Constitution that James Madison defended
came largely from his own hand the version approved by the Philadelphia convention on
September 17, 1787 prohibited the enactment of ex post facto laws guaranteed trial by
jury for criminal offenses and provided for other basic liberties significantly however it
did not contain what is now referred to as the Bill of Rights which contains the first 10
amendments to the Constitution the recently formed Congress did not approve the
amendments and send them to the states for ratification until September 25, 1789 and
they were ratified only on December 15, 1791 during the Constitutional convention
relatively little had been said about such a bill of rights mainly because the framers took
so seriously the idea that the Constitution spelled out only those powers that belong
explicitly to the federal government those powers moreover were regarded as quite
limited it was clear at least inferentially that unless the federal government had a
specific mandate to act it could not do so Madison himself reason that an attempt to
specify rights would cause more mischief than it prevented thus in September 1787 the
Constitutional convention had voted down a proposed bill of rights before approving the
Constitution itself opposed by the so-called anti-Federalists the lack of a Bill of Rights
jeopardized ratification and full support for the new Constitution writing from Paris where
he served as the nations Amb. to France Thomas Jefferson expressed his skepticism
about the omission and urged his friend Madison to back a Bill of Rights such a bill
argued Jefferson is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth
general or particular and what no just government should refuse or rest on inference
although less than enthusiastic at first Madison was persuaded not least because he
came to see that embracing a Bill of Rights would eliminate serious opposition to the
new central government eventually Madison headed the committee the draft of the
amendments whose ideas and language strategically chosen to soften anti-Federalist
resistance came mainly from the constitutions of various states when most Americans
think of the Constitution today the Bill of Rights is probably what first comes to mind
they agree with Jefferson's argument that silence about rights leaves too much to
inference and that it is better to spell out more definitely the boundaries between the
one central government and it's many citizens but the Jeffersonian solution brings
another round of problems with it because so much depends now on how fundamental
concepts freedom of speech for example or cruel and unusual punishment are
interpreted un-American ground their meaning is not eternally fixed if that outcome
precludes stagnation it also entrenches the paradox we've noted before Americans are
kept at odds by the very things on which they agree having led his troops to victory
beyond the despair of Valley Forge George Washington served the first two terms of the
American presidency his farewell address is a plea for American unity reviewing now as
well as then how elusive unity can be urging his contemporaries to esteem the immense
value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness he emphasized
how the term American referred to a single people they had worked and fought together
Washington stressed with only slight shades of difference he added you have the same
religion manners habits and political principles to enhance the good already achieved
Washington urged Americans to avoid the baneful effects of partisan passions end of
entangling affairs with foreign powers Washington's advice was well conceived not least
because it was occasioned by the very threats he warned against whether his
recommendations have been followed however is another issue at the bottom of that
issue is the fact that the course of human events as denied the United States the luxury
of isolation Washington moreover not only cluster underestimated the nation's shades of
difference but could scarcely have imagined the variety they would come to contain
homogeneity has never been a dominant American characteristic nor is it likely to be
unity will always be a rhetorical theme for American presidents arriving departing or in
between because its depth and quality cannot be easily presumed the first United
States census was taken shortly after Washington became president it's simple count
included only free quite meals aged 16 or more free white males under 16 to calculate
how many men might be available for military duty free white females all other free
persons including Native Americans who pay taxes and slaves the census of 1790
place the American population at about B .9 million including about 750,000 slaves
nearly 20% of the total the 1990 figures are contested particularly by municipal and
state officials who argue that the latest census skipped people in urban areas the poor
and minorities although the account may be off by figure larger than the one for the
1790 census Americans in 1990 nonetheless numbered about 250 million nor is there
any question about the fact that ours is a multicultural or culturally pluralistic society
take your pick on those terms as to which is politically correct these days in any case
that variety severely tests that has not already poured over the melting pot that once
was supposed to make diversity manageable significantly the country's population is
aging in 1991 in five Americans is at least 55 and 188 is at least 65 by the year 2000
men he more of us will be over age 65 as we speak the Association for American retired
people may well be among the largest if not the most powerful lobby in Washington no
less significant the 1990 census showed that about 12% of the nations people are
African-American 8% are Latino and about 3 1/2% are Asian the percentage of whites in
the population dropped to that 76% from a figure of 79% a decade ago furthermore by
the year 2000 it will be likely that more than 50 major cities in the United States will
have a majority population of minorities by the middle of the 21st century when
someone born in 1991 will be in his or her 60s the typical resident of the United States
will not trace ancestry to white Europe but to almost anywhere else Africa Asia the
Hispanic world the Pacific Islands Rabia language and religion tell a similar tale the
number of people in the United States whose usual language or mother tongue is other
than English rose from 28 million in 1976 to almost 35,000,000 in 1990 and will likely
reach 39 million by the year 2000 in Los Angeles which is much more sociological
microcosm for the nation than the Muncie Indiana that used to be preferred by
sociologists no less than 90 or languages can be heard in the public schools to no one's
surprise Spanish will be increasingly important in the United States but the presence of
Asian languages is rising as well religiously the same thing would be the case of the
diversity is is just immense and in staggering outside observers often understand the
United States better than Americans do themselves a salient example is provided by the
French statesman and philosopher Alexi de Tocqueville whose tour of the country
resulted in a classic called democracy in America hopefully no tour the United States in
the 1830s and 1840s and rotor still widely read study about us Americans one of the
things that Tocqueville was struck about was that I in the United States people had this
wide diversity of points of view and yet at the same time he was worried about this for
another reason namely that it seemed to him that the American principle was everybody
should kind of figure things out for themselves and think for themselves but at the same
time he thought people really do like to have some kind of of the support for their beliefs
they don't entirely like to be out there all by themselves alone and what they think and
so what he saw going on in the country was that there was something he called public
opinion that seem to be the thing that Americans turn to a kind of anonymous opinion of
some kind that told Tocqueville found was producing not this great diversity and
freedom that was so much. On the surface but rather what it produced was a kind of
conformity that.he took to be rather dangerous to liberty and freedom that Americans
stress so in another way in a kind of Ironic Way, Tocqueville uncovered something
about American diversity that also gave him applause for concern although it was not
exactly the same point that I was stressing earlier when I was just talking about the
sheer diversity that was present pope the found a kind of diversity that seemed to him to
the shower than it ought to be interestingly enough in what it produced then was a kind
of conformity and belief that that was problematic well however all that worked out one
of the things about diversity in America and about unity and about a new
Commonwealth it became clear was that eventually we as a people had to come to
terms with the problem of having as Abraham Lincoln put it half slave and half printf free
sworn to preserve protect and defend the Constitution of United States Lincoln pay the
price to keep his word about upholding the union only 85 years after the declaration of
independence a savage civil war became necessary to keep union intact and to certify
as the 13th amendment did after the war in Lincoln's assassination that neither slavery
nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have
been duly convicted shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their
jurisdiction Ken Burns's recent PBS epic on the Civil War brought home to us again how
pivotal that struggle has been in our history and to our identity today the battlefields at
Shiloh Chancellorsville and Gettysburg are quiet memorials the Confederates in
Yankees who fought to the death because they disagreed over the future of the union
and the place of slavery within it yet the calm of those places is deceiving for the
violence of faction remains among us this was understood by the 20th century poet
Robert Lowell as he summed up bitterly one strand of American life in his poem children
of light from which I quoted at the beginning of this lecture the beginnings made by the
resolute Europeans who first called the ground American were the birthday of a new
world in many ways they created a better one than had ever before existed still the
beginnings were not so new because as Lowell says the serpent seeds also planted
here reaping what was sown the children of light steamed the land with blood fencing
their gardens with the red man's bones in the process is goal puts it relatively few
Americans can regret without hypocrisy that our fathers those Puritans and rebels and
people from other places embarked from the Netherlands nonetheless the United States
and the American dream also retain a wild and savvy to leaving their daughters and
sons to wander in the land wondering how to make a Commonwealth from the one and
the many such wandering and wondering leads toward indeed creates frontier dreams
the topic that will be focused

Lecture 3:
Him a just a couple of things to keep in mind is as we've gone about themes maybe that
are running through our reflection so far what is I hope that as I allude to the different
figures from American history and literature and philosophy and religion and politics
that.we can think about these people as friends it with whom we engage in conversation
we may not always agree with friends they may make life difficult for us at times but
they are also people who can inspire us who can help us who can I keep us thinking
about important things secondly I hope that you'll take note of the richness and in
particular the ambiguity in the richness of the American tradition that were looking at as
we talk about the the American dream the variety of viewpoints its present the clashing
the contradiction the collision sometimes but also be keeping an eye out for things on
which Americans seem to agree but at the same time and this is the third point as you
note the things that we agree about listen for ways in which the very things that we
agree about also often the things that separate us that divide us and lead us into by
disagreements and problems of one kind or another good example from the previous
lecture that would probably be Jefferson's claims about equality or are basic
understanding about human rights with those rights are Allie should be interpreted what
boundaries we place on them and so now with that is the beginning for the third lecture
let's consider for a time now frontier dreams and my epigraph my little quotation to get
us started on this idea comes from an American poet named Emily Dickinson who has a
line in one of her beautiful poems which simply says I dwell in possibility at the 1893
world's Columbian exposition in Chicago a young American professor named Frederick
Jackson Turner read a paper to a conference of fellow historians that paper called the
significance of the frontier in American history remains one of the most influential
interpretations of American life and its tree put simply Turner's argument was that the
conditions of frontier life were the most significant facts of the nations history to that
point noting America's succession of westward moving frontiers Turner claimed that
each one afforded settlors contact with untouched nature a perennial rebirth an escape
from the bondage of the past and above all the opportunity which he declared had
become another knee for America frontier existence fostered he added the individualism
self-reliance and self-determination democracy faith in humankind encouraged to adapt
to change that Turner saw as dominant American characteristics that the course of
American history has been marked by a series of frontiers is of course indisputable at
first it was the eastern seaboard confronted by the Puritans and other early settlers later
it was the Alleghenies the Mississippi Missouri the Great Plains the Rockies or even the
Pacific Ocean itself Turner has been criticized however for exaggerating the influence of
the frontier on American ideals and on the American character he is also been accused
of confusing actual frontier existence with the romantic myth that have grown up around
it even when such criticism is justified to dismiss Turner's pieces altogether is to take to
lightly the powerful effects that the idea and the myth of the frontier and of the West in
general have had on American imagination those effects have been profound they help
to account for the concept of manifest destiny with all the ambiguities and ironies
contained in that concept they also help to explain why do so many Americans past and
present the West with its temporal as well as spatial connotations has stood for
condition in which an idealized past can merge with an idealized future to make
anything seemed possible and they surely account for the fact that the most indigenous
American heroes are Western frontiersman historical personages such as Daniel Boone
Davey Crockett Wyatt Earp even Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln fictional
creations such as James Fenimore Cooper's leather stocking and figures who have
appeared countless times in American film the likes of Gary Cooper Henry Fonda John
Wayne Clint Eastwood and more recently and with some very revealing twists Kevin
Costner in his dances with wolves this is not to say that the effects of the myth have
always been happy ones this may constitute what the 19th century poet Emily Dickinson
called the fairer house than prose but not necessarily a sound or one the myth of the
West may have misled Americans into believing that the future is absolutely open and
unaffected by the past or that simple physical movement from one place to another will
inevitably improve the quality of one's life or that the nation's space and natural
resources are inexhaustible for good real however the myth of the West is the ground
from which a lot of American dreams have sprung and continue to spring though not to
Native Americans from the time of the first American colonists if not before the land to
the West was a symbol of the unknown of the unexplored and a future possibilities that
fact not always recognize sufficiently need the West fearsome as well as a blurry
Cabazon evocatively mentioned earlier found that it was a pretty person think of wander
into what is now New Mexico for example true the West was a potential garden of the
world but it was also a place fought with possible and as it turned out real terrors and
hardships it was a place where many believe the new Adam and he perhaps might arise
but it was also a place where men and women might revert to a primal savagery not
escaping from the bondage of the past at all but plunging backward or forward into a
barbarism from which civilization had presumably rescued them it was a place that
promised individuals attempting freedom from social restraints but it was also a place
that threatened them with the agonies of isolation with cultural deprivation and with the
loss of the comfort and security of historical tradition Turner had his own uncertainties
about the West although he believed that frontier life was merely a step toward the
development of a higher civilization the subtle tone of his essay suggests that a part of
him lamented the frontiers passage ambivalence is the feeling you get one wag
suggested when you see your worst adversary drive your new BMW or Lexus over 3000
foot cliff ambivalence was not something that was foreign to turn in this by the way will
be another theme that I hope you watch for I think there's something about American
experience that that makes us all little ambivalent from time to time we like what is
happening at the same time we may often be distraught by worried about it even
wanting to protest what is happening as we will see if not feel before the series of
lectures concludes American life often has the effect of producing the mutually
conflicting thoughts and feelings including those of love and hate of which ambivalence
is composed unmistakably it is the distance it is discernible in the works of earlier
American writers who sang the praises of untouched nature and yet identified America's
glorious destiny with the settling and the passing of the frontier several such tensions
are evident for example in of course letters from an American farmer which I mentioned
in an earlier lecture born in France have core had immigrated to Canada and
subsequently to New York where he took up farming and probably in the decade
preceding the American Revolution which he opposed wrote most of his letters they
were first published under his pseudonym J Hector St. John in some respects craft
cores account smacks of pastoral romance describing agrarian life on a relatively early
frontier along the eastern seaboard he speaks sentimentally about the morally uplifting
aspects and effects of the farmers direct contact with the land like Turner after him Chris
Cooper asserts that frontier life encourages democracy and he stresses the opportunity
intellectual as well as economic which the simple fact of space affords Americans yet in
this sunny romantic picture of credit course there are some darker hues as well even if a
mild government makes quick or think that American society is the most perfect society
now existing in the world he is nevertheless appalled by the horrors of slavery he
witnesses on a trip that takes into Carolina especially disturbing to him as the site of a
caged black man perhaps an involuntary arrival from the middle passage the Charles
Johnson has recently chronicled so powerfully in his 1990 national book award-winning
novel with that title a slave had been put there not by uncivilized persons but by men is
graphically describes them in a more improved condition evidently there improvement
witchcraft core observers with irony less intentional than it might have been maybe that
improvement consists mainly of an outlook which tells them that the laws of self-
preservation render such executions necessary as for nature creek oversees that it can
be beneficial and life in nature is on the whole preferable for life in a complex society
that foster such rationalized brutality of slavery but nature can also be capriciously cruel
and walk Revco or believes that contact with nature ought to be benign it often has the
opposite effect on those pioneers venture into the wilderness so here we have an
example I think in an early writer at 718 century author the person who on the one hand
wants to praise the frontier as something that produces these noble virtues including
democracy and yet he finds he probes will deeper into American life that there are some
darker sides and that life on the frontier often has quality is not a civilized all and so a
quick course conclusion if you can draw one from these ambivalent reports that he
gives is that the frontier and indeed all American life in some ways needs to be team
can civilize more than the has been in the experience of it that he is head the nation's
great 19th-century storyteller Nathaniel Hawthorne never lived on the frontier if he
shared some of Chris Cooper's ambivalence and skepticism and he was more keenly
aware of the ironies of American life and American aspirations always carefully his
writings to acknowledge humanity's capacity for goodness and its need for faith and
moral progress he was a child of the Puritans and thus acutely conscious of the
magnetic chain of evil as he called it an fractious passions linking all the sons and
daughters of Adam these convictions are all expressed again in Hawthorne's short story
called Earth's Holocaust set on one of the broadest prairies of the West this sketch
depicts the efforts of a group of radical reformers to burn all vestiges of the past and to
make a truly new beginning on a blank expanse of seemingly endless boundless
possibilities the dream that an earthly paradise can be created Hawthorne implies it
wants in the story that their hope is an illusion whether the scene he says is in time
Pastore time to calm is of little or no moment because dreams of a totally new beginning
on the frontier are is doomed to failure now in the future as they have always been
Hawthorne's reforming firebrands act not as the rational enlightened new Adams they
seek to be but rather as a passionate unruly mop considering everything old to be of
little worth they savagely set fire to good and bad alike for time but only for a while the
stories narrator defends them although mildly disturbed when great literary and
philosophical works are thrown into the fire he nevertheless argues that nature is better
than a block and that if we read it right it will be to us a volume of eternal truth but when
even the Bible is consigned to the flames is merely a fable of the world's infancy the
narrator of the story begins to see that the tightening of innovation at first shaking down
only the old and rotten shapes of things had laid his terrible hand upon the main pillars
which supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual state a dark stranger who
also skeptically observes the supposedly reforming destruction reminds the narrator that
the reformers have neglected in fact to destroy the prime source of evil namely the
human heart Hawthorne would seem to agree that the heart is indeed the only truly
boundless sphere where inexistent the original wrong of which the crime and misery of
this outward world were merely types he would also seem to agree that until that foul
cavern is the story calls the human heart until that foul cavernous purified the world will
be the old world yet even in the American West it is worth noting however that the dark
stranger who makes these claims is described as a satiric figure and as such a purveyor
of only half-truths ultimately Hawthorne suggests that the whole truth lies elsewhere on
a frontier so to speak between a blind optimism and a despairing pessimism admittedly
when one considers the violence and lawlessness that eventuated the spoiling and
pollution of nature the land speculation that sacrificed human rights to property rights on
the frontier then one may be tempted to adopt the darker sides of crib coolers and
Hawthorne's views but another feature of frontier life which some scholars are calling
ethnic side if not genocide pushes that possibility even further and this of course takes
us into that chapter of American history and the frontier involving Native Americans is
probably no coincidence that Turner's famous essay about the closing of the American
frontier came only a few years after violent Indian resistance what was called the march
of civilization came to an end on December 29, 1890 in the battle many say the mass
murder of wounded knee Creek it took the lives of several hundred Dakotas Sue in
South Dakota women and children as well as man and most of them on our Turner
makes no reference to wounded knee the story still the nation a century later but his
famous essay about the frontier did observe that at the Atlantic frontier one can study
the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier the first frontier Turner
went on to say had to meet its Indian question that question was answered with a
vengeance note the 17th century victory sermon of increase Mather a leading Puritan
minister who asked his congregation to thank God that on this date we have sent 600
season Pequot souls to hell ponder the prerevolutionary observation of Virginia's
governor that westward moving colonials looked on the Indians as but little removed
from the brute creation consider the 1851 statement of secretary of the interior
Alexander Stewart the policy of removal he said except under peculiar circumstances
must necessarily be abandoned and the only alternatives left are too civilized or to
exterminate them we must adopt one or the other reflect on the 1878 observation of
Shockey socially chief that our fathers were steadily driven out or killed we their sons
but sorry remnants of tribes once mighty are cornered in little spots of the earth all ours
by right cornered like guilty prisoners and watched by men with guns for more than
anxious to kill us off this nightmare side of the American dream is one that deserves
more than the deep regret expressed by an October 1990 congressional resolution
concerning wounded knee was Sharkey's little spots of the earth moreover got smaller
still with the passage of the Dawes act in 1887 which would set Indian policy for the next
half-century it provided for the dissolution of the tribes as legal entities and the division
of tribal lands among individual members hundred and 60 acres for each Indian family
had Homestead intended to encourage the Native Americans to stay in one place and
farm healed in Washington as an Indian Emancipation Proclamation the more
transparent effect of the Dawes act was that millions of Sir plus acres typically the best
land to could now be sold to white settlers thus it was that in his 1891 report to
Congress Pres. Benjamin Harrison could insist that the Dawes act and the American
dream went hand-in-hand since March 4, 1889 Harrison proclaimed about 23,000,000
acres have been separated from Indian reservations and added to the public domain for
the use of those who desired to secure free homes under our beneficent laws it is
difficult to estimate continued the increase of wealth which will result from the
conversion of these wastelands into farms but it is more difficult to estimate the
betterment which will result to the families that have found renewed hope and courage
in the ownership of a home and the assurance of the comfortable subsistence under
free and healthful conditions hearing words like that 100 years later helps one to
understand that at the very least if the West was indeed another name for possibility
opportunity then the possibilities realized and opportunities exercised were at best a
mixed moral matter brother Frederick Jackson Turner was convinced in 1893 that never
again will such gifts of free land offer themselves he was equally persuaded that he
would be a rash profit who should assert that the expansive character of American life is
now entirely ceased Turner understood that Americans who dwell in possibility will seek
and find what might be called pluralistic frontiers for frontiers and the dreams they
inspire occupy diverse dimensions of American life in a 1966 introduction to
Tocqueville's democracy and America for example Max Lerner suggests that during the
1830s and 1840s the United States had a triple frontier geographical industrial
commercial and democratic latter personified by Andrew Jackson the nation's first
Western president to these Turner or learner rather learner might have added a fourth
frontier namely a philosophical frontier called transcendentalism which opened not in
the West but in the East under the lack leadership of Ralph Waldo Emerson a diverse
group of new England thinkers and writers centered around the Massachusetts Village
of Concord the included people like Theodore Parker Margaret Fuller Henry David
Thoreau this group of people set off a kind of second American Revolution this was not
a violent revolution or even one that sought power for partisan purposes you did have
political implications however for the transcendentalists urge their fellow Americans to
consider a new what it means to be alive three targets drew the transcendentalists fire
first we could say they were pretty well opposed to the old Puritan theology had had
existed which Emerson called the mumps and measles of the soul and they despise this
view basically because it seemed to them it had such a dark view of humankind and
even of God who was so often portrayed as a God of judgment and one who would
punish wrongdoers for their sense of they were opposed to to that point of view but
another target that they had in mind was that they wanted Americans to cease and
desist imitating European culture Emerson especially and Thoreau and the others in this
group were always agitating for Americans to find their own way of doing things
particularly where literature and art and poetry were concerned they wanted something
that was American and not just borrowed from other places and then a third thing that
they were quite concerned about one could say was simply that they felt that Americans
too often were kind of asleep at the switch they just were failing to live up to their
potential of the word probing deeply enough into their own spirits and they were
preoccupied on the other side of the this the young ledger too much with a material and
financial concerns so they were critical of those things also in their package of beliefs
there were three kind of basic ideas that they held of a more positive nature there kind
of positive philosophical view and that these shared convictions might have been
summarized by Emerson something as follows first he would've stressed and the others
along with him that the most genuine human life is characterized by moral sensitivity
and spiritual awareness the referred often to intuition as they called it which is a kind of
combination of reason and feeling and imagination which if it were used correctly could
lead one beyond the appearances of experience into a discovery of the fundamentals of
life which for them placed an emphasis on unity beauty and goodness secondly they
stressed very much that nature was of importance and that it should be studied not
simply from a scientific point of view but as a kind of place where one could discover
moral and spiritual even political truths that were important nature provided a kind of
language the transcendentalists thought which read correctly can teach people what
they are and how to live and since America at its best is like nature both many and one
the nation the transcendentalists thought was also potentially a social manifestation of
nature and even of divinity itself thirdly the transcendentalists stressed that realization of
one's relations with others should be coupled with a self-reliance rooted in the
development of one's own personal moral and spiritual qualities the true claims of the
individual they thought can be reconciled with those that are proper to society as a
whole if we recognize the existence of the fundamental spiritual quality in reality from
which all things arise in which permeates everything and everyone through such
reconciliation the spirit of democracy is nourished but this depended then in turn for the
transcendentalists on each person to find out who they are with their potential winners
into to act upon it and to use it so they have view that does stress very much the a
spiritual quality of the natural world and of our lives and this enabled them to envision a
combination of unity and diversity oneness and many nest that would produce a kind of
harmony which if everyone did their part and understood correctly quite nature was
revealing to us would produce a society that would truly be one in which human
excellence could be achieved Emerson's book nature was the first great
transcendentalist document it appeared in 1836 it was the most thoroughgoing
expression of his view of the physical world and Eumenides relationship to it his essay
about the American scholar was in turn a classic declaration of America's cultural
independence from the courtly Muses of Europe as he called them and more generally
from the authority of the past in his famous discussion of self-reliance became the
quintessential statement of America's faith in that individualism which according to Rick
Jackson Turner was nurtured by the frontier in that essay Emerson urged his
countrymen to trust the aboriginal self on which a universal reliance maybe grounded to
cultivate the unaffected innocence of the child which he believed the American Society
of his day was conspiring to destroy while he agreed with his friend Henry David
Thoreau that as Emerson put it in his essay on politics the less government we have the
better there is nothing anarchic or Savage about Emerson's ideal individual the
aboriginal cell to which he refers is instead the bearing genius within everyone it is the
divine idea which each of us represents the image of the oversoul Emerson's word for
God whose primary wisdom lying in the deep forests of the heart beneath a socially
conditioned consciousness is the best weapon against the stifling conformity Henry
David Thoreau Emerson's most famous disciple was more outspoken about concrete
social issues slavery for example and labor conditions in the textile mills of Lowell
Massachusetts and he was more the radical nonconformist in his mentor Emerson as
his famous book Walden testifies he also lived in closer contact with the land and wrote
more concretely about the natural world for all his naturalistic pursuits and descriptions
however they were not in themselves his principal concerns keenly conscious of what
he called the double mess of all things the road to like Emerson was primarily
concerned with nature as a symbol of certain higher laws the focus on the physical as
physical and nothing more would be to give oneself over entirely to one's animal nature
he saw and to subordinate ones spiritual faculties it would correspond to what Thoreau
called life without principle thus the Rose frontier like Emerson's was an interior region
the West he contemplated was a country of the soul true in his early essay walking he
speaks of the West in standard 19th-century terms as representing progress fertility and
the future it's physical spaciousness he indicates me actually produce an intellectual
expansion yet even in this essay his westward walking principally symbolizes his
exploration of the wildness within himself and one suspects that his advice to young
men to go West should be taken unlike Horace Greeley's more symbolically spiritually
and literally the Rose comments in an essay called life without principle represent his
attitudes with special clarity declaring that the ways by which you may get money
almost without exception the downward and lamenting the incessant activity of his
money minded neighbors the role also believes that physical movement in itself
westward or otherwise can be a distraction from that spiritual voyaging that plunge into
the profound depths of soul which is the really important business of life hence he
derives the rush for gold in California was going on at the time since the most precious
metal is the gold within one need go no farther than the Concorde woods to mine once
found it shines like the ever glorious morning one of the Rose favorite metaphors for the
discovery of that primal innocence which to him as to Emerson is the basis of moral
principle how to live and what to live for the answers to those questions where the
object of Thoreau's retreat to Walden Pond pioneering venture on his own personal
frontier I went to the woods to row concluded because I wished to live deliberately to
front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach
and not when I came to die discover that I had not live how to live what to live for the
essential facts of life such frontier issues were not only on Thoreau's mind at Walden
Pond in the summer of 1848 about a year after Thoreau left his hot at Walden Pond for
good in about a year before he authored his well-known essay on civil disobedience five
women Quakers and seasoned abolitionists among them named Gene Hunt Marianne
McClintock Martha Wright Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton carried forward
their own frontier dreams by sending a notice to the Seneca County Courier the
newspaper in Seneca Falls New York the notice announced that the convention to
discuss the social civil and religious conditions and rights of women will be held on
Wednesday and Thursday the 19th and 20th of July as the five women began to plan
the agenda for the Seneca Falls convention Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw that a careful
restating of the declaration of independence might provide the best expression of their
American dream we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are
created equal in that phrase Elizabeth T Stanton did nothing more the head two words
those two however settle why in other places her declaration of sentiments as it was
called had more to say for example she wrote the history of mankind is a history of
repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man poured woman having in direct
object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her to prove this she added.
Freezing Jefferson let facts be submitted to a candid world Stanton's facts showed why
American women had good reason to feel themselves as she put it aggrieved
oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights and the Seneca Falls
declaration insisted that these women should have immediate admission to all the rights
and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States to make those
rights and privileges more specific the declaration from Seneca Falls offered a series of
resolutions one of them called for women to have an equal participation with men in the
various trades professions and commerce a view that Supreme Court Justice Joseph
Bradley would contest in his 1872 decision in case called Bradwell versus Illinois in that
case decision Bradley wrote that the natural timidity and delicacy of the female sex
evidently unfit said for many of the occupations of civil life 68 women and 32 men sign
the deck the Seneca Falls declaration among the latter Frederick Douglas the escaped
slave whose voice was so often raised on behalf of abolition and human rights although
it passed the only resolution that was not unanimously adopted by the signers was the
ninth one if held that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves
their sacred right to the elective franchise the the boat other words as late as 19 five
Pres. Grover Cleveland would be on record as saying that sensible and reasonable
women do not want to vote and American women would not obtain the franchise until
the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920 other resolutions from the Seneca Falls
convention created a legacy of issues about equality that remain unresolved even now
but the Seneca Falls declaration contained in influential vision nonetheless perhaps no
ingredient in that vision has proved to be more important than the fact but by working on
their feminist frontiers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friends help to show how the
American dream as vital self corrective and expansive power now another frontier and
what I'm trying to do here is to suggest to you the variety of the kind of frontier themes
that you can explore when you think about the American dream on some of these are
geographical of course but others have to do with philosophical themes and the political
questions to there seem to be lots of frontiers that Americans have to deal with end of
these are very much a part of our of our history and our unconsciousness so let me try
to tell you just about one more in the in the time it's remaining here and on this one will
have to do with with another American philosopher whose name was William James
born six years before the Seneca Falls convention at the height of the transcendentalist
movement and son of a father sympathetic to some aspects of it William James became
an influential leader in the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism
James had learned from Emerson and Thoreau but in contrast of them he argued for
what he called the pluralistic side stressing the flux and variety of experience in a world
that he called him perfectly unified still and perhaps always remain so by the
transcendentalist James did believe that reality is in process but to such an extent that
truth itself far from being eternal is in the making as propositions are acted upon and
tested in concrete situations human freedom James affirmed has much to say in
determining what the world and even truth itself will be writing at the turn-of-the-century
James did not disagree with Benjamin Franklin's poor Richard who said God helps them
that help themselves but neither did he believe that a world of genuine freedom could
be so automatically pro-American as some vociferous nationalists opposed no fortunes
genes argued can be told in advance choices yet to be made and actions still to be
carried out side what will happen by no means however our fulfillment and salvation
impossible James thought if Americans will do their best progress toward both can be
made James love the United States but he was no uncritical patriot referring especially
to the squalid cash interpretation that he found Americans putting on it he called
success the bitch goddess with that earthy metaphor James was not attacking individual
accomplishment he was however casting aspersions on the drive toward bigness that
he saw at the roots of American business and industrial expansion he was also
opposed to the nations imperialistic leanings which he regarded the 1898 Spanish-
American war as a primary example dangers lurked he believed in growing materialistic
hungers spurred on by American accomplishments so that as he put it picture papers of
Europe are already drawing Uncle Sam with the heart instead of the Eagle for his
heraldic emblem the seeds of global warfare in international economic chaos were
beginning to sprout is James's life came to a close they would create a profoundly
different situation than he knew but in his own day James worked to save Americans
from themselves convinced as he was that the deadliest enemies of nations are not
therefore enfolds they always dwell within their own borders James's American dream
was that Americans would use freedom wisely doing so he thought involved frontier
conditions James's accent on the frontiers of an open evolving universe on the world's
possibility and opportunity on the virtues of the strenuous mood as he called all of these
are compatible enough with the transcendentalists optimism but Emerson sometimes
fuzzy mysticism and the symbolic mode inherent two transcendentalists writing are
lacking in James he is surely more tolerant and less ironic than throw indeed James's
essay on a certain blindness and human being sounds like a criticism of the Rose
contempt for people who are apparently concerned only with making a living what has
no right James says to pass hasty judgment on the labor of others for that labor may
have significance to them beyond what we perceive it may reward them with a sense of
duty fulfilled or of a victory in the face of obstacles Thoreau asserts that most men and
women are blind to themselves James says they are more likely to be blind to one
another the blindness that separates one consciousness from another constitutes a
frontier that should be opened not closed in other ways however James resembles
Emerson and Thoreau more than might be suspected a psychologist as well as a
philosopher in a student of the varieties of religious experience as he called one of his
great books James two was vitally concerned with what he called the objective world
the vast world of inner life beyond us so different from that of out outward seeming a
sense of which can come upon us from nature and from other people alike despite his
tolerance genes to deport Americans up session with practical interest even went so far
as to suggest like Thoreau that a person may have to be a loafer to gain insight into the
truly significant and thus be able to change the usual standards of human value in
recalling both Emerson and Thoreau James asserted the sovereignty of the present this
world he contended never did anywhere or any time contain more of essential divinity or
of eternal meaning that it does here and now by Frederick Jackson Turner's reckoning
the first period of American history ended for centuries from the discovery of America at
the end of 100 years of life under the Constitution with the closing of the frontier yet
ideas and language associated with the frontier resounded our national rhetoric they do
so partly because of the history and legacy of the geographical frontier and partly
because of frontier challenges of the kind explored by Emerson and Thoreau the
creation lot and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and William James as long as it dwells in
possibility American life seems likely to keep frontier dreams alive further evidence
along those lines will appear in the next lecture survey of unalienable rights and rugged

Lecture 4:
Him a seems that we been working on not continually cut across one lecture to another
so I talked about the frontier last time and I hope you'll hear some echoes of the frontier
of the coming on the coming up again in this lecture which is on unalienable rights and
rugged individualism and the epigraph to start us off comes from Woody Guthrie whom I
quoted before this land is your land this land is my land this land was made for you and
me when my children were little we used to play another game by Milton Bradley think I
collect a lot of games actually don't have too many but two of them are relevant to our
teams here this one was called of the game of life we predictably meant being a
millionaire but unlucky rise of the dice can make you a loser instead in that case the
game board said he retired to the country and became a philosopher I thought in mind
losing this game too much when I play a few years later as you know from what we've
said earlier Milton Bradley buried the fee while millionaire status was still the goal like
skiing became the American dream these pursuits of happiness these games both
provided help along the way you could take a stock market tip by insurance or try a new
career failure to make the right move at the right time however spelled mediocrity if not
misfortune or disaster but the game designers neglected to offer assistance that
Americans apparently consume as quickly as publishers can put their writers advice
field words between covers to reflect American life accurately somewhere in the game
of life and the American dream game should've let you land on a square where you
could buy read and heed a self-help book doing that is part of the American way as old
as it has been profitable for those whose tree's books scores of self-help books appear
every year they cover a host of topics some offer to teach us how to enhance business
by becoming one minute manager's others prescribe how to improve our looks are
personalities how to achieve better health by adopting a vegetarian diet or how to
expand happiness by doing aerobics or running a marathon by reading you can also
learn how to remodel your house or enjoy better sex or how to cope with earthquakes
children and the Internal Revenue Service still other examples preach the power of
positive thinking or if that's not trendy enough the latest New Age spirituality principles
of success rules for living well and the steps always simple it seems to put them into
practice these are the keys to the kingdom of self-help not surprisingly many of them
unlock the secrets of the game of life and the American dream they map the way to well
whatever the aim envisioned by self-help books which are kind of frontier approach I
suppose in some ways their pitch is usually that grasping the goal is within everyone's
reach yet the appeal is also that if you take their advice the wisdom show in doing so
will make you different and better in the mediocre majority who lack the good sense and
initiative to improve these books and words sell both ways anyone can do it they insist
that their doctor advice is especially for you the discerning individual has uncommon
determination to try but if such appeals want to make us feel good about ourselves
twice over they trade on guilt pangs to failure to buy read and heed its advice warns the
typical self promoting self-help book equals lost opportunity the advertising for one
recent entry in the self-help field a book by Mark Fisher called the instant millionaire
provides a case in point its type describes the book as a concise to our read by a writer
who wants to share generously with others the secrets of a philosophy that did not force
him into country retirement did meet him a millionaire at 36 instead one promotional
blurb identifies a few of Fisher's secrets they include clichés such as don't be afraid to
ask don't underestimate your own self-worth and eating high and then this book
tantalizes the prospective buyer at least in its dust cover blurbs by asking for 1295 who
among us can afford not to read this book Fisher's advice isn't bad one could certainly
do worse with 1295 and by reading he is book however improbable doing so might even
help to make one an instant millionaire less remote to ponder though is what the
continuing popularity of the self-help genre may tell us about ourselves the American
dream are unalienable rights and our so-called rugged individualism the American
dream depends on the gospel of self-help already in the 18th century Benjamin Franklin
understood and promoted that vision his witty wisdom for good living trouble springs
from idleness for example and early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy
wealthy and wise sayings like that help to make his poor Richard's almanac early self-
help classic he was urged to complete his equally famous autobiography by a friend the
judge no one to be better qualified than Franklin to promote a greater spirit of industry
and early attention to business frugality and temperance with American youth it
provided more advice much of it stated with an astonishing simplicity my favorite one
being simply imitate Jesus and Socrates Franklin hoped for the prudent and ethical
practice of business but as we previously noted in the next century the transcendentalist
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson found Americans distracted by materialistic interests
is correct it entailed an awakening of spirit yet these advisors shared important traits as
well both Franklin and Emerson criticized Americans were being half asleep for feeling
to energize their potential each was also highly optimistic about what American life
could achieve but everything hinged on what Emerson called self-reliance Ms. 1841
essay on that subject urged the American individual to avoid conformity to avoid
conformity to understand that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and to
trust thyself Emerson self-reliance became a fundamental statement of America's faith
in individualism although in some ways the self-help genre is really a form of other
reliance advising us to do what others say it nevertheless remains quintessentially
individualistic to thus it is doubly indebted to Emerson to Franklin before him much good
has come from American individualism and from the self-help initiatives it has produced
and encouraged but dangers lurk within this tradition to in so far as self-help fever self-
fulfillment over civic virtue and the publicly responsible patriotism we may care too much
for individual wealth and not enough for our Commonwealth significantly when the
framers of the Constitution wrote its preamble they said nothing about instant
millionaires or even about winning the game of life their American dream concentrated
to stick instead on establishing justice promoting the general welfare and securing the
blessings of liberty not only for ourselves but for our posterity in short they wanted a
more perfect union but how can rugged individuals with unalienable rights best achieve
that goal if they can in 1962 the American novelist John Steinbeck published a book
called travels with Charley in search of America for decades he had lived in and written
about the United States in works such as his classic rates of wrath but late in life
Steinbeck felt out of touch with his own country so after packing a customized BN at
least style it could've been customized in the late 50s or early 60s and taking along his
dog Charlie he set off on a journey of recovery through what he called this monster land
the voyage involved much more than geography yearning to revitalize contact with the
multiple dimensions of American ground Steinbeck wanted to renew his feeling were the
country by reconnecting himself to the human skate as well as the landscape of the
nation within both he looked for common ground for beliefs attitudes in hopes that
Americans could be thought to share he sought for foundations and experiences that
provide good reasons to think that Americans possess a future worth having in his own
American-style Steinbeck polished his findings only to have a puzzle remain Americans
as I saw them and talk to them he wrote were indeed individuals each one different from
the others but gradually I began to feel that the Americans exist that they really do have
generalized characteristics regardless of their states their social and financial status
their education and religions and the political convictions but if there is indeed an
American image built of truth rather than reflecting either hostility or wishful thinking he
added what is this image what does it look like what does it do Steinbeck's quandary
has been shared by other Americans before and since his travels with Charley it exists
not only because Americans are individuals but also because they have been deeply
touched by the concept of individualism typically that concept stresses the separateness
of one human being from another and the responsibility and initiative that each person
must take the self-help that each person must provide on his or her own behalf where
such convictions lead from one generation to the next problematical individually or
collectively however it is unlikely that Americans will set their individualism aside thus a
perennial issue for the corporate possibilities of the nation is to determine critically what
individualism at its best does and does not mean fortunately that task is not entirely one
of new discoveries or some Americans have thoughtfully explored the passive
individualism before and in addition some observers who are not Americans but it would
been especially interested in us as a people have done so as well an example of the
latter kind is the astute French explorer weight met before the series Alexis de
Tocqueville who surveyed American ground in the 1830s and 40s he reckoned that
among the lucky circumstances that favored the establishment and assured the
maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States the most important was the
choice of the land itself in which the Americans live a limitless continent topo believed
promised the opportunity and general prosperity that could blend with the Americans
love of equality and liberty to yield favorable outcomes for the pursuit of happiness
Topol envisioned Americans preparing the triumphal progress of civilization across the
wilderness but on other occasions he had second thoughts they often focused on
individualism among the first to use that concept Tocqueville understood individualism
to be of Democratic origin as he put it and early on he questioned the basic American
belief namely that individualism is a virtue democracy fosters a quality Tocqueville
believed and in so doing disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mantra of his
fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends damning the spring of public
virtues topo went on to say leaving the greater society to look after itself individualism
does not have far to go before it results in egoism or narcissism a passionate and
exaggerated love of self Tocqueville called it which leads a man to think of all things in
terms of himself and to prefer himself to all hopefuls worries about individualism
centered on the negative implications it had for a healthy society he knew of course that
individualism did include many assets self-reliance personal initiative and self-help to
me but three even believe that Americans had succeeded in mitigating the worst effects
of individualism by using their liberty to cultivate political institutions and voluntary
associations so that as he said there should be an infinite number of occasions for the
citizens to act together and so that every day they should feel that they depended on
one another the Pope will never completely quieted his uneasiness that American
individualism might eventually prove to be an ironic asset that would turn American
ground into wasteland the second half of democracy in America began with a chapter
entitled concerning the philosophical approach of the Americans less attention to Bill
observed in that chapter is paid to philosophy in the United States in any other country
of the civilized world nevertheless prizing individualism so much he explained
Americans follow the approach of the French philosopher Descartes by displaying what
Tocqueville called a general distaste for accepting any man's word as proof of anything
instead they rely on individual effort and judgment to determine what they believe as
with most of the American qualities he discussed Tocqueville found the philosophical
approach of the Americans to possess both strengths and weaknesses skepticism
might nurture a praiseworthy critical attitude self-reliance could produce desirable
innovation but another consequence of those assets was the undermining of authority
and tradition that result in turn could lead to other mischief for where reliance on
authority and tradition are severely undermined people people still seek confirmation of
their views in the judgments of others and there determined efforts at self-help we need
them to try the latest fad that comes along the despotism of unthinking conformity which
stands at a far removed from the public spirit that ensures real freedom may not be far
behind evidence for the accuracy of Tocqueville's fears can be found in the sociological
survey of American ground conducted in the mid-1980s by Robert Bella and his
associates borrowing one of Tocqueville's phrases to title his study Bella and his
colleagues took the pulse of habits of the heart in the American middle class and that
was the title of the book habits of the heart which perhaps you know their Bella found
individualism may have grown cancerous that it may be destroying those social
integument's the Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities that it
may be threatening the survival of freedom itself in short they'll surmised many
Americans tend to be so obsessed with personal self-fulfillment that the capacity for
commitment to the basic institutions of marriage family politics and religion is
dangerously impaired Tocqueville of course would've found none of this surprising his
ambivalence toward democracy was considerable precisely because he feared it would
unleash a sense of self interest so badly understood as to numb senses of civic
obligation and with her concerns about what is best for the community as a whole
sensing that radical is more apt than rugged to describe America's contemporary
individualism Bella has been skeptical that an adequate social ethic can be built on its
foundations yours a very optimistic that altogether different foundations can be secured
on American grant once more following Tocqueville however Bella and his colleagues
think that biblical religion I provide a cause for hope biblical religion of course is not one
thing thus it often has divisive effects in America but Bella banks on however is the
power of religion to make people concerned for persons and causes beyond the
confines of individualistic self-fulfillment religion can have this effect at least in part
because it points to a moral order that stands beyond the vicissitudes of historical
relativity and thereby can inspire individuals to pursue what is good for the community
Bellows hopes include some ironic twists while religious leaders in church folk are often
increasingly drawn to the social and psychological sciences for solutions to problems of
religious life Bella in his colleagues are social scientists who think that religion contains
vital solutions are social and psychological maladies in our culture they do not suppose
however that religion provides a sufficient resource to accomplish all that is needed if
American ground is to support public beliefs and institutions that sustain democracy and
freedom requirement is to locate and create a variety of resources to drive home the
importance of pursuing the common good fortunately the land still contain such
possibilities Tocqueville wrote that the Americans have no school of philosophy peculiar
to themselves and they pay very little attention to the rival European schools indeed
they hardly know their names like many of his judgments that one was not infallible
band and is even less accurate now American thinkers have developed a distinctive
philosophical set of perspectives and in one way or another issues about individualism
and community have often been there focal point and so I would like to speak a little bit
about how in the American philosophy some of these issues about individualism have
been addressed one who address the issues that we're concerned about in this lecture
was the poet philosopher Walt Whitman in a book called Democratic vistas which he
published in 1871 he said that he liked to think of the words of America and democracy
as convertible terms that same work however displays Whitman's philosophical concern
about the validity of his hopes specifically he worried that there were too few persons
with some definite instinct why and for what America has arisen lacking that instinct he
added the United States might prove to be the most tremendous failure of time in any
case he contended America would have to count for her justification and success
almost entirely on the future Walt Whitman himself did not state all that the requisite
instinct involved he linked it to his version of individualism which he called personalism
democracy American-style thought Quitman insist on an equality of individuals that
equality means nothing however unless it entails a twofold recognition first whatever the
differences people are one in being persons and second being persons entitles all to
dignity and enjoins each to respect others in short if America and democracy deserve to
be convertible terms one fundamental reason for America's existence is to encourage
and individualism that is schemes person Whitman saw another crucial element much
depends on how to answer the question what is a person but he was not the one who
best spelled out an American philosophical response to that question that honor might
be shared by his sire Royce America's great philosopher of community and by thinkers
such as George saw Tiana John Dewey and Reinhold neighbor who were influenced by
him Royce understood a person to be relational stretched out into a past and the future
as well as existing in the present he argued that a community exists just to the degree
that person's share memories and hopes which include ethical commitments and
collective loyalties he held further that my idea of myself is an interpretation of my past
linked also with an interpretation of my hopes and intentions as to my future his point to
sum it up simply was that a coherent individualism requires caring relations that reach
far and wide such relations found an American expression on May 20, 1927 opening the
throttle of the Spirit of St. Louis that Friday morning Charles Lindbergh taxied Donald
Long Island runway to begin his solo flight across the Atlantic to Paris France nearly 34
hours later Lucky Lindy and his plane emerged from the darkness to touch ground again
a world and journeyed with the lone Eagle in his flight significance was not lost on
American ministers who preached to their Christian congregations the next day a typical
example of that Sunday's rhetoric was the sermon given by the Rev. Dr. Russell Bowie
of Grace Episcopal Church in New York City in his sermon called the lure of the
impossible bully remarked that Lindberg manifested that indomitable heroism which
weather in victory or defeat has made possible the progress of the human race for the
mastery of its world there is a fund of moral hero is a he continued as well as a fund of
physical heroism among men which thrills to the challenge of the impossible that seems
Sunday morning far to the west of Paris and New York another Christian pastor preach
to his congregation the record does not show what Reinhold Niebuhr told those
predominantly blue-collar workers in Detroit but it is doubtful that his sermon was as
glowing as Russell Bowie's for doing this. One of the entries in Niebuhr's diary included
these words I wish that some of our romanticist and sentimentalists could sit through a
series of meetings wrote Niebuhr where the real social problems of the city are
discussed they would be cured of their optimism a city which is built around a productive
process in which gives only casual thought in incidental attention to human problems is
really a kind of hell thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us
eat drink and make Mary what a civilization beavers comments would probably be
equally critical today if not more so according to the national planning data Corporation
there are now nearly 20 American cities with populations over 250,000 and per capita
incomes of less than 12,000 Detroit is among them so our Newark Cleveland St. Louis
and New Orleans basing its findings on data and estimates from the Congressional
Budget Office the Center on budget and policy priorities reported that in 1990 the gap
between rich and poor in the United States is greater than at any time during the past
40 years the combined incomes of the richest 2 1/2 million Americans are almost the
same as that of the combined incomes of the poorest 100 million Americans meanwhile
the 1990 report of the national commission to prevent infant mortality show that the
United States has fallen to 20th Pl. among developed nations in the effort to reduce
infant deaths our nations capital Washington DC was found to have an infant mortality
rate rivaling those of many Third World countries rugged individualism unalienable
rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness facts are often unfriendly to the
American dream the world Reinhold Niebuhr saw and would see today was certainly
this side of Paradise to borrow the title of one of F Scott Fitzgerald's early novels
moreover neither struggled within it quite differently from Fitzgerald's character in Blaine
and American who honestly admitted that I detest poor people as a young pastor in
Detroit and later as one of the most perceptive thinkers the United States has yet
produced neighbor worked to develop a religious perspective relevant to the broad
social and political questions that face the nation and the world in the 20th century
during the period from 1930 to 1960 he was to theology in America what John Dewey
was to philosophy together with George Satie on another observer of American life who
addresses the concerns of this lecture they can still contribute greatly to a much-needed
public philosophy that recovers insight about why and from what America exists and
that also tells us some important things about individualism inside the former Nazi
concentration camp at.com the following words have been inscribed those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it that often quoted warning comes from a
book called the life of reason a beautifully written essay by George saw Tiana he was
born in Madrid and remained a Spanish citizen throughout his life but his university
training was a Harvard where his teachers included William James and Hsieh Royce
between 1889 in 1912 he taught philosophy at Harvard and wrote many books but upon
his resignation from the University saw Tiana left the United States never to return
England was home for a while and then roll he died there leaving behind a long list of
literary credits he described himself as an American only by long association but he
nevertheless acknowledge the important contributions that American culture and
American friends meet upon him so he affirmed that it is as an American writer that I
must be counted if I am counted at all in 1920 Santiago published a series of essays
which are still wonderful meeting called character and opinion in the United States for its
epigraph he might have taken one of F Scott Fitzgerald's comments in the novel the
side of paradise which was published in the same year describing his character Amy
Blaine Fitzgerald wrote it was always the becoming he dreamed of never be Santiago
would have thought that such a trade was not only quite characteristic of a Marine
blame but of Americans in general the Santiago proceeded he found first that every
American is in exile either voluntary or involuntary program voyages pioneer tracks the
violence of forced relocations or just changed jobs these things Santiago thought
produce what he called the moral emptiness of a settlement where men and even
houses are easily moved about and no one almost lives where he was born or believes
what he has been taught but exile status is even more complicated than that American
upper rudeness if not rootlessness combined with the spirit of youth that Santiago
underscored repeatedly and this was something that he found that led Americans to
think very little about the past ignoring or forgetting the past putting things behind them
out of sight out of mind is a quality matched only by romantic nostalgia when Americans
do choose to recollect is sucking on a sought as a people he believed Americans are
fascinated by the future he also detected overwhelming optimism about what lies ahead
often supported by religion or by industrious trust in nature's bounty Blandon clash of
idealism and materialism though it may be American Santiago thought have a tendency
to think that all things do shall work together for good according to sake on of these
attitudes supported a rough and ready individualism he emphasized for example that
Americans expect every man to stand on his own legs and when American has given
his neighbor a chance Santiago added he thinks he has done enough for him Santiago
thought that what he called Codling socialism did not stand much of a chance in the
United States but Santiago also saw something more he found very little mean-
spiritedness among the Americans he described on the contrary there was a
fundamentally shared commitment to the individual's pursuit of happiness if that
commitment meant that people had to stand on their own legs it also enjoined them as
Santiago said to be helpful in their turn while Americans might disagree about what the
nature of the help should be Santiago felt that there nevertheless was substantial
agreement about a basic sense of responsibility to help one another acting to make that
feeling reliable is still crucial for American life born in Vermont that bastion of Yankee
individualism John Dewey spent most of his life in the collective hustle of Chicago and
New York his experiences led him to a book called individualism old and new witchy
wrote in 1929 in 1930 we we live in times when the R word recession as even been
read on George Bush's lips but when John Dooley wrote the DWORD depression name
the devastating reality Dooley saw that the long-standing American emphasis on
individualism provided a pivotal issue for the nation and the world always somewhat
mythological old-style American individualism contended Dewey had been modeled
after the image of self-reliant self-made pioneers they saw opportunities for personal
fortunes and set out to win them on their own but do we thought that we lived in a
different time and place we lived in a world that was becoming increasingly incorporated
and he felt that that should require us to rethink what individualism might mean Dewey
advocated no return to a preindustrial pre-corporate America assuming such a reversal
had been possible he would not favored it even in the midst of an economic slump he
saw vast increases in knowledge and technological power is vindicating the potential for
good that use of scientific method can bring to life this point was rather that human
intelligence must be used more extensively and rigorously than ever to harness that
potential and to channel it toward humanizing benefits instead of encouraging the
practical rationality of cost-effectiveness to become the tail that wags the dog duly
thought that Americans must rally ingenuity to discern a revised and renewed
understanding of what the initiatives of individualism ought to entail the basic problem
facing Americans do we contended was that of forming a new psychological and moral
type. If the new beginning in again although that order seems more than can be
accomplished fortunately it may also be true that such an order is unnecessary to
recover and act upon the purposes for which America as arisen what do he talked about
was essentially something quite close to the core of an already existing American
sensitivity that is alive if muted even now Robert Bella observed for example in his study
habits of the heart that contemporary Americans do not always practice the radical
individualism they preach functionally he noted their lives are given me by familial
communal public ties the transcend the individualistic calculus of self-fulfillment at which
the culture has become so verbally adept if they need more experiences of social
commitments that sustain nevertheless Americans do sense that those relationships of
memory and hope are the substance of essential wife anticipating what Bella as
confirmed Reinhold Niebuhr shared Dewey's ethical and pragmatic concerns but his
sense of tragedy in human life was more profound that's giving him affinities with
Santiago as well as a perspective for criticizing some of the excesses to which national
life is prone the difference between Santiago in Heber was also significant however for
sake on assault religion mainly is something aesthetic while Niebuhr was fundamentally
committed to the notion that history is not simply a drama involving men and women but
also one that includes God he kept confidence in what he called the divine power whose
resources are greater than those of man and whose suffering love can overcome the
corruptions of man's achievements without negating the significance of our striving that
confidence backed up the famous prayer which is known to many people but not always
credited as it should be to Reinhold Niebuhr God give us grace to accept the serenity
the things that cannot be changed courage to change the things that should be changed
and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other here however never counted on
religion to be the unifying element in American life not only did he recognize that the
varieties of our religious and nonreligious experience were too expensive for that
outcome to occur he also harbored skepticism about so-called civil religion suspecting
that it typically legitimated established ways undeserving of the fever in that respect
Niebuhr had learned from Karl Marx but he also drew the line from Marx's influence was
concerned though neither agreed that religion can be the opium of the people he
stressed that its role could and must be very different religion he believed was properly
prophetic a critic of culture within the United States he affirmed one of the one of
religions tasks was to keep attention focused on the heart of democratic individualism
one of neighbors best remembered lines and he was a little bit like God Franklin and
some others he could get off very nice kind of aphoristic sayings about things but but
one of his a most memorable lines I think is this one he said on one occasion man's
capacity for justice makes democracy possible but man's inclination to injustice makes
democracy necessary Niebuhr attested that the best insights of Western religious and
democratic political theory converge to affirm the preciousness of individual personhood
the religious sensitivity of Americans could provide much-needed energy he added to
make that belief a resource for the highest forms of social realization but to the extent
that it any individual or group take seriously the individual personhood of others the
recognition that respect is owed them receives a boost that's neighbor insisted that
religion though it cannot unify the country remains a vital ingredient any sound
understanding of why and for what America exists Niebuhr's instinct about America
suggested to him a creed that combined competition and cooperation the energy
encouraged by individual freedom he thought could result in common purposes
quarrelsome differences among American brothers and sisters might keep driving home
the fact that they are one people after all if not a family by communally ensuring each
other basic rights to go personal ways they might stay together on the same way still
seeking the covenant so rarely found American Negro urge needs to use the irony
within its history as a prod to discover the twists the biblical paradox the Niebuhr himself
loved so much to employ those twists include insights like these people who try to
secure their own ways along are far more likely to lose themselves than those who take
the risks of getting their lives for others a coherent individualism requires caring to
understand that interdependence makes independence possible personal initiative that
does not serve others impoverishes the communal spirit necessary to give that initiative
life and vitality each in his own way sought Tiana Dooley and Niebuhr urged that
through ability and effort individual Americans could achieve success and thereby
revealed the depth of our potential to create and share a true Commonwealth one that
would extend well beyond the borders of the United States yet hopeful though these
thinkers were about American individualism and its future their optimism also remained
rightly regarded by critical and even skeptical questions Santiago wondered but the mix
of idealism and materialism in American life would be duly pondered whether Americans
would use their vast scientific and technological skill for rational moral ends neighbor
tried to find the needed ways to make relevant the messages contained in the ancient
traditions of Passover and Easter they all might've affirmed not only for themselves but
also for the nation what Walt Whitman Tsai Royston F Scott Fitzgerald would also have
found convincing namely that if this land is truly made for you and me that prospect
requires understanding that the highest forms of social realization depend on
cooperative dependence as well as on individual independence discovering why and for
what America exists entails that more than the becoming should make up the American
dream the being the substance of what America has been and is which includes the
best in our tradition of individualism needs to greet needs to grip people equally as we
shall see again in the next lecture it will concentrate on dreams of success
disenchantment and depression as we will see in that lecture the being in forms and
even determines what a becoming individualism

Lecture 5:
Him in this lecture begins the second half of our series on the American dream and I'm
calling this particular part of the series dreams of success disenchantment and
depression and the epigraph comes this time from an American poet named Edwin
Arlington Robinson wrote a poem that is contained in a lot of anthologies called Doug
Richard Cory and one of the lines that poem says so on we worked and waited for the
light just to refresh our memories a little bit about where we been in the first half I want
to remind you that we've been drawing from poetry in politics from song and story from
history and philosophy journalism and commerce and a lot of other sources and that will
continue to be the pattern as we keep exploring from the past and the present and on
into the future what the American dream has been and what it tells us about ourselves
the inquiry were engaged in is one in which we all have a part play a contribution to
make because the story of the American dream is really the story of our lives but the
dream story will test I believe in a hope it's been shown already and what we've done is
that we have by no means been a perfect people and yet we are a distinctive people
with a history that confers responsibility not to despair and not to give up trying to be
better than we are as you are aware by now I hope it is not simple to focus an answer to
the question what is the American dream the dream is hard to define simply and once
and for all because it is not one thing but many yet it can also be said that there is a
subtle unity amidst all the diversity one way to locate that unity is to concentrate on the
fundamental American assumption that new beginnings are always possible and
frequently desirable other cultures of course have shared that assumption so that belief
would not be a sufficient reason for speaking of the dream as anything distinctively
American unique qualities however begin to appear when one locates the major aims
that have governed attempts at new beginnings on American soil at the same time
when one begins to catalog those games it becomes apparent that a factor of diversity
is still very much in the picture if the essence of the American dream consists of
assumptions about new beginnings and on other ideas that cluster around that theme
aspirations in those directions have ranged from the highly idealistic to the utterly
materialistic economic success has been a crucial element of the dream from the outset
of American colonization and it remains so today at the same time anyone who studies
American history will be struck by the fact that ideas and ideals not just economic forces
must be taken into account to grasp what occurred and the part of the New World that
became the United States fences of religious mission and thirsts for freedom of religious
expression exerted early influence opportunities to establish new forms of government
particularly those that would defend human rights perceived as unalienable and is giving
primacy to the liberty of individuals were even more powerful they did much to nurture a
sense that Americans ought to be unique that they should leave the past behind them
that they should seek their identities in self-reliance not hierarchy and aristocracy but
the quality became a key idea although the prizes went to those who proved by their
actions that they had excellence more than others at least that notion was the one that
Americans like to believe and talk to each other granted it did not always square with
reality and some Americans demythologizing the myth adding self-critical dimensions to
the dream in the process and challenging the people to make good on the best ideals
they claimed to serve Americans have not always use their freedom well but the dream
has stressed admonitions to do better particularly to do better in building spirit of
community that can forestall the dangers inherent in narrow self-interest the dream and
its dreamers then are related organically the dream became many as one strand
seemed more important and another less salt it grew and developed as it still does but
the relationship also worked the other way Americans did not only change the dream as
their interests and inclinations dictated those interests and inclinations have been
affected by the dream as well because whatever diversity it contains the dream also has
an integrity that makes it less than infinitely malleable that integrity enables the dream to
be among other things a potent source of social and political criticism dreams of
success are among the oldest and most enduring strands of the American dream and in
America's success has always been defined at least in part by material prosperity
granted to the Puritans success meant establishing a Christian Commonwealth of God's
chosen people who were to be bound together by mutual affection and dedication to
spiritual salvation material well-being was nevertheless important to them to if only as a
sign that God approved of their endeavors similarly to Thomas Jefferson and his
compatriots success meant forming a more perfect union three of the social and political
deals of Europe in which men might exercise their unalienable rights to life liberty and
the pursuit of happiness yet life was linked to property and it was clear that the pursuit
of happiness entailed the pursuit of material goods indeed in the Federalist James
Madison implied that the most unalienable right of all is the right to private property
surely to the impetus behind the westward movement was not merely a desire to
escape what crib cooler called the ancient prejudices and manners of the old world
perhaps more than anything else free land and eventually the discovery of gold in
California induced Americans to venture farther and farther west now as we've also
seen in the previous lectures there were critics who began to address this version of the
dream of success which they saw as being too much assessed with material being and
economic prosperity in the pursuit of wealth we talked earlier about Emerson and
Thoreau for example as people who spotted that trend in American life and work critical
of it and there have been many others all the way through our society and our history
who have play that role too but that strand has gone along with the continuing strand
that has stressed the importance of material prosperity and economic growth and
development as an essential part of the dream and I supposed to some extent these
two things will remain intention with one another as long as life in the United States
continues well if some critics felt that a serpent had entered the American garden in the
form of the machine industrial developments led to the formation of a new class of
American wealth and to a modified if not entirely new measure of success in contrast to
some of the early visions that had existed here the Rockefellers the Carnegie's
Morgan's build enormous fortunes by shrewdly capitalizing on natural resources the
market and the cheap labor of immigrants who as a class were largely dependent on
industrial employment for their survival to some Americans these captains of industry
were Titans updated versions of the strong self-reliant American hero a superior breed
exemplifying in human affairs the concept of survival of the fittest to others however
they were little better than Pirates robber barons as some called them who would
sacrifice everything and everyone to their left for wealth and power to these ruthless
man it was fat and all too often rightly so view was held that these these men control not
only the economy but also they controlled the politicians who were willing to overlook in
the name of laws a fair the entrepreneurs wrongdoings even more disturbing to some
observers Americans in general seemed increasingly ready to accept a strictly monetary
concept of success this might be all well and good if riches could be achieved without
sacrificing ethical principles but even if principles had to be shaded slightly wealth was
still the goal advocated as the most worth striving for to be richer than a keen as Edwin
Arlington Robinson described Richard Cory the famous 1897 poem he named after him
seemed to make most Americans as art as Robinson put it wish that we were in his
place so Americans worked on and waited for the line and probably most Americans
were unpersuaded by the demise that Robinson penned for Richard Cory who one,
summer night went home and put a bullet through his head one of the interesting people
who was critical of the dream of success that was so heavily equated with economic
development and material accumulation was an early American economist named
Thorstein Veblen and I would like to just say a little bit about him this economist was an
iconoclastic social theorist and university professor who wrote about the leisure class as
he called it in a rather famous book called the theory of the leisure class he did not
restrict his analysis of that class as he sought to its particular American version but his
book clearly pictures the late 19th century American scene as he sought Veblen found
the leisure class flying at high position through what he was the first to call conspicuous
consumption to the term that has found its way into our vocabulary quite a lot that
conspicuous consumption's relation to the economic process that will and wrote is a
pecuniary relation a relation of acquisition not a production of exploitation not of
serviceability out of instinct and self interest the leisure class that one thought is also
inherently conservative opposing any changes in institutions policies or habits of
thought that might threaten to undermine its power it's Outlook devil and argued is
actually regressive since the economic relations it defends our holdovers from what
Veblen called the predatory stage of social development by resisting change the leisure
class impedes the evolution of an entire society thought as for those classes that would
gain the most from innovation their creative energies are exhausted in simply making a
living while there habits of thought their ideas of what is good and right the symbols of
success the steam are inculcated in them by the very class that exploits their labor
Veblen's theory was bitterly attacked not only by members of the leisure class itself but
also by his fellow academicians nonetheless it influenced American economic thought
and contributed two arising sympathy for social control in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries it could be and was argued that the policy of laws a fair criticized by Veblen
and serve the country well at one time and should by no means be dismissed as
obsolete furthermore any kind of governmental control even if designed to promote the
general welfare was bound to be viewed suspiciously by people who prized individual
freedom as highly as Americans always have for even though the United States is
probably always been a society deeply divided by class most Americans lack much in
the way of class consciousness beyond thinking that they are middle-class as some
80% of them apparently still do according to polls taken early in this decade believing
that clock and lock can make any of us like Richard Cory glitter when we walk
Americans find it hard to accept that they cannot break constricting boundaries class or
otherwise and begin a new for if and Andrew Carnegie can rise from his humble
beginnings become steel magnet and millionaire thereby realizing the prevailing dream
of success so can anyone else or so the thinking has gone one of the most staunch
defenders of this Outlook end of the laws a fair economic philosophy that often went
with it was an influential professor of political and social science at Yale University
whose name was William Graham Sumner in a book called what social classes owe to
each other Sumner's answer to the question raised by his title was simple and forthright
as far as American life is concerned Sumner said that the social classes over each
other nothing believing that God in nature have seen the chances and conditions of life
on earth once and for all Sumner distinguished between deals which belong to the
struggle for existence and what he called eels due to the faults of human institutions
only the latter according to Sumner should be the concern of associated effort and since
the United States already has a set of institutions that are just writes when one person's
actions impinge on the freedom of another's the best thing to do is not to tamper with
those institutions Sumner held that American society just needs to be let alone although
within a natural social order there are bound to be unjust inequalities some of these
argued Sumner would be remedied by natural adjustments others by voluntary
concessions however the cost of trying to remedy them by other means especially
through direct governmental interventions is too high thought the price is loss of
freedom a society based on contract as Sumner insists is true of American life is a
society of free and independent man he wrote it follows that one man in a free state
cannot clean help from and cannot be charged to give help to another but the Puritans
called brotherly affections are thus socially irrelevant for Sumner believed that in a state
based on contract sentiment is out of place what then is success on a view like
Sumners according to Sumner it is making the best of oneself individually which is not a
separate thing from the duty of filling one's place in society the condition for both social
and personal success then is unrestricted freedom if Sumner puts social Darwinism as
the view came to be called into his theories the life of Andrew Carnegie embodied social
Darwinism by personifying the rags to riches dream Carnegie wrote a very influential
essay which simply had the title well this appeared in 1899 and was widely read taken
to heart by a lot of people who believed what Carnegie had to say in that essay
Carnegie wrote that upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends and he
added that the problem of our age is the proper administration wealth Carney he agreed
with William Graham Sumner that nature's laws should not be tampered with foremost
among these is the so-called law of competition said Carnegie although he admitted
that this law is sometimes hard for the individual he also argued that in the long run it is
best for the race because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department
implicitly the fittest individuals according to this view are those capable of amassing the
most well and progress for the race consist largely if not entirely of improved material
conditions in short Carnegie assumes but success his wealth he would've put it more
elegantly but I think you would like that bumper sticker that says he who has the most
toys at the end wins or something notice how it goes but there's something of that
philosophy that so also to be found in both summer and Carnegie I think with some
qualifications because unlike Sumner Carnegie believed that the wealthy are morally
obligated to help the less successful who are willing to help themselves no advocate of
indiscriminate charity as well as somewhat of a Puritan in his own lifestyle Carnegie
urge the wealthy to live on ostentation tenaciously and to administer philanthropic
league their surplus wealth he argued in particular that they should do so by providing
parks libraries and other institutions designed to improve the general condition of the
people thus the true gospel according to Andrew attempts to reconcile an unfettered
individualism with a social conscience material success with moral intellectual and
aesthetic values ironically the great industrialists of this late 19th century. Were not in
fact as much opposed to governmental interference in the economy as they profess to
be they supported it when as in the case of high tariffs it works to their advantage by the
turn-of-the-century it was becoming increasingly apparent to more and more Americans
that the ever widening gap between rich and poor was not going to be bridged by
philanthropy nor was social justice going to be achieved by the kind of economic and
political order that the Sumners and Carnegie's advocated it was time many felt for the
government to intercede on behalf of the have-nots as well as the hands not only
because of the social problems involved but also because the principles of justice that
Americans supposedly stood for were being violated Americans generally were no less
enamored of materialistic success than before but they were less convinced that the
prevailing economic system provided everyone with a fair and equal opportunity to
succeed hence as the 19th century came to its end what we call the progressive
movement in its various forms was born under leadership provided by the likes of
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who called for legislation that would look
after the men who were on the mate rather than the men who are already made reforms
were introduced but not enough to keep disenchantment and depression away for long
during the Wilson era the United States entered World War I to make the world safe for
democracy the nation's participation in that conflict was brief and victorious but the war
and its aftermath shook American idealism a number of people came to doubt that the
United States had fought for moral reasons the first place who after all had profited from
the war was it the common citizen or was it the big industrialist the munitions maker the
House of Morgan as novelist John does possible capitalized at it was certainly not those
who actually experienced the horrors of the technological warfare a warfare that called
into question the very doctrine of the nine scientific progress like Frederick Henry the
hero of Ernest Hemingway's a farewell to arms they were more likely to see nothing
sacred about a war that was supposed to end all wars nor did postwar America lighten
the hearts of liberal reformers for the decade of the 1920s was in general politically
conservative the progressive movement of course did not die out altogether there were
still calls for social reform and organized labor began to take an active political role but
tired of causes and evidently suspicious of any idea that smacked remotely of such
foreign ideologies as socialism or communism the voters including newly enfranchised
women sent to the White House three conservative Republicans Warren Harding Calvin
Coolidge and Herbert Hoover despite corruption in the Harding administration the
victory of the monopolies over the trust busters and the exclusion of factory workers and
farmers from the benefits of the postwar economic boom it was not merely a
conservative but in deceptive ways cost of the decade to to the middle class at least the
nation seemed about to realize its dream of success Unlimited prosperity for virtually
everyone the conservatism of the 20s did not curiously enough extend to morals and
manners the 20s also included what F Scott Fitzgerald called the greatest gaudy as to
spree in history starting with the younger generation that soon extending to its elders a
revolt against 19th-century sexual taboos frugality and self-restraint took place in novels
such as the great Gatsby and tender is the night Fitzgerald dramatize the reckless
gaiety hedonism worship of money and moral irresponsibility of the. In an essay called
echoes of the Jazz age in which Fitzgerald looks back on the 20s he treats the
characteristics of that time with ambivalence typical of his outlook admitting to some
nostalgia for the utter confidence of this decade he wrote that even when you were
broke you didn't worry about money because it was in such perfusion around you and
regretting that he and his generation will never feel quite so intensely about our
surroundings anymore Fitzgerald also recognize that during the 20s America seem to
have abandoned its dedication to work in moral decency and social justice in favor of
the frivolous superficial in the self-indulgent writing at the beginning of the 20s George
Santiago about whom I spoke yesterday had described Americans as idealists working
on matter by 1931 Fitzgerald tended to look back on Americans more simply as
materialists. And noticeably vulgar ones that the gaudy spree ended as all sprees must
when the financial structure of the United States collapsed beneath the tangled heap of
stock market ticker tape not long before one of Herbert Hoover's 1928 campaign
speeches had healed the prosperity that a rugged individualism and free competition
brought to the nation this message turned out to be sadly ironic as banks and
businesses failed as the lines of the homeless and unemployed grew steadily longer as
cities became what Mary Heaton force called a school for bombs once confident but
now days Americans disenchanted and depressed could not quite understand what
happened to their dream prosperity might be just around the corner as they were
repeatedly told but that quarter seem to keep receding even farther down a lengthening
street what happened to the American dream of success to the land of opportunity or
people willing to work could prosper according to their ability and industry questions of
that kind have not been restricted to the Great Depression of the late 20s and 30s
versions of them arise today at the beginning of the 1990s a decade that is not part of
what Mark Twain called Gilded Age but if Newsweek's last issue of 1990 proves correct
an age of anxiety instead when that issue of Newsweek appeared the United States
was well into an economic recession that has been worsened by runaway deficits both
the highest rate of inflation and the lowest growth rate in retail sales since 1982 and the
worst unemployment figures and three a half years the Labor Department's count for
December 1990 indicated joblessness for about 6.1% of the nation's workforce some 7
1/2 million persons Latinos and blacks disproportionately represented among them that
figure incidentally did not include 900,000 more men and women so-called discouraged
workers who have stopped trying to obtain work and are not included in the Labor
Department's statistics meanwhile the stock market at least until very recent days got off
to its second worst annual start in history worried about the war with Iraq leading the
nation toward his problematic version of a new world order there's that new beginning
theme again George Bush was named Time magazine's genus faced man of the year
for 1990 because energetic and insightful though his approach to foreign affairs may be
it stands in stark contrast to his lethargy about domestic ones according to Times
analysis be that as it may if the 1990s proved to be an anxious age for the American
dream that will come as no surprise to those who are familiar with Kevin Phillips and his
book politics of Rich and poor wealth and the American electorate in the Reagan
aftermath a book which spent many weeks on the bestseller list in 1990 irony riddles the
story that Phillips tells in the 1980s the world seem to be going America's way he points
out Berlin's wall came down much of Eastern Europe rejected communism embrace
democracy and invested hope in capitalism even if nothing more substantial was
available the Soviet Union became more friend and foe self-congratulation however was
premature enthralled by international developments that appeared to vindicate the
United States the nation's leaders underestimated socioeconomic distress at home now
it threatens to turn the American dream nightmarish by the end of the 1980s Phillips
argues homeownership long a basic ingredient in the American dream was becoming
just a dream for more and more Americans especially for those in their 20s and 30s that
example is just one of many that Phillips had in mind when he began his first chapter
with an apt quotation from the Wall Street Journal of March 31, 1989 this quotation said
statistical evidence already suggests that the American dream is stating this is perhaps
apt following up on the advertising for the Wall Street Journal that I mentioned to you
early on where the Wall Street Journal proclaimed that if the American dream has a
diary the Wall Street Journal is it not everyone of course felt so gloomy for many
Americans the Reagan years and even their immediate aftermath have been the best of
times or so they were led to believe whatever the beliefs let's revisionist appraisal
shows that the Reagan era produced its own immense redistribution of wealth in that
redistribution the poor and working middle class lost ground he argues the rich
especially the richest of the rich tenet if Ronald Reagan's appeal subdued that intention
at first Phillips further shows how it eventually became dominant very late in the day
Phillips contends the nation is starting to face the economic devastation that plagues
the Reagan aftermath a 1980s seachange took the United States from being the world's
largest creditor to being the world's leading debtor in the past 10 years the national debt
is tripled to more than $3 trillion the great communicator will be remembered for many
things but Phillips suggests that few of his accomplishments will be more important than
the toll taken by Reaganomics Phillips's tally is that it will sap the nation strength and
standard of living for years to come contrary to the conventional wisdom of Reagan's
most trusted economic gurus George Gilder Arthur Laffer and Milton Friedman to name
a few of these capitalist theologians as Phillips dubs them debts and deficits mattered
mightily and would not disappear as their theories predicted no chorus of hosannas to
loss a fair change that nor could the tax cuts and tight monetary policies that were
healed as tickets to prosperity some tickets to prosperity there were but mostly the lips
argues they went to a favored few charitably he thinks philosophy and policy dictated
that outcome more than sheer greed but nonetheless he says the American dream was
beginning to crumble not just in inner-city ghettos and farm townships but in blue-collar
centers and even middle-class suburbs that realization portends political upheaval for
most Americans do not resent wealth per se by any means but they do resent its
accumulation through favoritism now Phillips's credentials make his deep concern about
these results all the more interesting he is no Marxist or socialist he's not even a
Democrat this keen observer and astute journalist was the chief political analyst for the
1968 Republican presidential campaign his conservative identity is as solid as it is long-
standing appraising the Reagan Bush 1980s Phillips's voice is that of the responsible
critic from within by focusing on contemporary American politics the politics of rich and
poor Phillips's book has added interest because it includes three important historical
dimensions these all may be debatable but I think they are interesting to contemplate
first stressing what even American political parties often overlook Philip sees conflict
over the distribution of wealth at the heart of our political process the genius of
American politics he says is been to manage through ballot boxes and electoral votes
the problems that less fluid societies resolved with party structures geared to class
warfare and even with barricades in the United States Phillips is saying politics is civil
war by other means power clashes singly or in combination they include regional
cultural ideological and especially economic interests power clashes produced dramatic
results according to Phillips typically these clashes whether Americans recognize the
fact or not are between economic classes the wealthy the poor in the middle classes
may all be American they may all want greater wealth to but these shared realities also
keep them in our the stakes in American elections are high since the American
Revolution Phillips argues the distribution of American wealth as depended significantly
on who controlled the federal government for what policies and in behalf of which
constituencies putting that point in a More Colloquial Way, Phillips quotes blues singer
Ray Charles damn that's God is then that gaps and I ain't got nothing yet billionaires
and the homeless not by accident the United States got a lot more of both during the
Reagan years Phillips notes that Ronald Reagan had a personal antipathy toward
income taxes he was far from alone far from alone of course and there was enthusiasm
for his tax reduction programs its most significant component a key to the trickle down
part of Reaganomics involved reducing the top personal tax bracket from 70 to 28%
before his second term ended by Philips is reckoning however that measure produced
precious little trickling down the top 1 to 5% of the population he claims that the lion's
share of the benefits for the vast majority of Americans Reaganomics cost them if
enterprise grew much of it focused on leveraged buyouts junk-bond and other forms of
paper entrepreneurship rather than on more productive forms of investment meanwhile
economic inequality also grew while increasing amounts of US property to say nothing
of jobs left American hands as trade balances shifted in their favor debt servicing
interest receipts boomed in the dollar's value fell investors from Japan Germany and
England name but three found America selling itself at bargain basement prices the
Reagan aftermath finds less and less of the country owned and controlled by Americans
themselves for a time even the terms of the United States government contract put the
concessions at Yosemite national Park under Japanese control when the Matsushita
electric industrial Company recently completed its $6.6 billion takeover of MCA in the
long run the challenge will be for Americans themselves to keep from destroying
Yosemite's ecology and even my sister thought Yosemite's operations should remain
United States owned which is apparently more than many American business leaders
feel about their own operations downtown commercial real estate illustrates the point
according to Phillips by early 1988 foreign owners held 21% of such property in
Manhattan 32% in Minneapolis 39% in Houston and 46% in Los Angeles in one industry
after another foreign firms have been increasing their global leadership by acquiring
American companies the selling of America need some people rich and Ronald Reagan
helped the rich get richer Phillips argues they won the 1980s economic battle in
American politics but Phillips thinks that victory cost far too much because it
squandered the nation's future in terms of international purchasing power he laments
the United States is now only the ninth wealthiest country in the world in terms of per
capita GNP we have been surpassed by Austria Switzerland the Netherlands West
Germany Denmark Sweden Norway in Japan what is happened is unprecedented but
not entirely which leads to a second historical component of major importance in
Phillips's analysis if American politics consists of power clashes often rooted in
economically-based class disparities he believes it also has a distinctively cyclical
quality deal from Thomas Jefferson's election to the presidency in 1800 Phillips discerns
a series of 28 to 36 year waves inaugurated by watershed elections that have changed
the nation's direction invariably these elections targeted an elite that is considered to
have gone too far the pattern as Philip sees it goes something like this one party takes
power from another through voter rebellion against an entrenched elite that has lost
touch with a broadly based constituency within two or three decades however the party
that took power gets trapped in a similar way empowering its own elite excessively it
becomes a target for new round of populist outsider ship and reform the Philips is
correct one conclusion might be that the Republican dig might be up in 1992 according
to his weight readings cycles Philip sees Ronald Reagan as pivotal in what is the third
cycle of a Republican version of the pattern that just described Abraham Lincoln's
election in 1860 William McKinley's in 1896 and Richard Nixon in 1968 these were
watershed elections as Phillips thinks of them that were based on a broad appeal for
national unity an appeal that was far more it was rooted far more in in not just of a
broader patriotism than in simple commercial interests before these Republican cycles
ended however economic interest endemic to Republican ideology took over beyond its
emphasis on the politics of national unity Philip surmises dynamic capitalism market
economics and the concentration of wealth are what the Republican Party is all about
Ronald Reagan put it more simply when he said but I want to see above all is that this
remains a country where someone can always get rich in any case the Republican
pattern that Phillips discerns entails a shift from broad middle class nationalism into
capitalist overdrive disinflation limits on business regulation and government alike tax
reduction high interest rates these are among the traditional Republican measures that
take effect if they appeal widely for a time their success eventually creates
disillusionment now Phillips goes on with with his critique and he doesn't spare the
Democrats either because he says among other things that the Democrats are history's
second most enthusiastic capitalist party and so they tend to thanks to go along with the
trend as long as it's going well but the thing that they have a field to see in this is really
going to getting into the the third point that that he wants to make his analysis is that the
Democrats should realize that their constituency is really war as Phillips understands
that the people who are inclined toward the Not part of the political spectrum the lower
classes in the middle classes and that the failed miserably in 1988 to recognize that fact
and if they had I recognize that more overtly they might've done I'm better in that
presidential election and they did now distillates wanted Democratic victory in 1992 not
likely but clearly he does want economic reform in the final analysis and this is another
key point to note his book his outlook retains a traditional American dream optimism
about the American people Phillips counts on them to do the right thing echoing some of
George Santiago's sentiments about character and opinion in the United States he
senses they will not tolerate excess for too long whether the excesses that too much
government control and too many taxes or too much wealth in the hands of a few and
too many others left out her yet if Phillips retains elements of an optimistic American
populism he also senses that the cycles of American politics may not recover and
revitalize all that needs reclaiming his closing remarks observed that by 1989
concentration of wealth mounting debt and financial recklessness increasingly caused
Americans to approach the future with foreboding foreboding and actual experience
however may not match each other yet at least that finding appeared in early December
1990 poll that was taken by the Los Angeles times and whose results were announced
on New Year's Day 1991 based on a randomly selected cross-section of about 2200
American adults that poll found that Americans were dissatisfied about national life by a
margin of 221 just a year ago opinion split evenly on that issue yet nearly 9 in 10 of the
people polled reported satisfaction with their personal lives and those of their local
communities virtually the same result as a year ago the question is whether personal
experience will catch up with more continue to converge from broad perceptions that
have been increasingly negative in the early months of the 1990s among the factors in
determining that outcome will be the nation success in dealing with issues rooted in
race and gender the topic to which we will turn next
Lecture 6:
Him a the title of this lecture on some dreams deferred is reflected in the epigraph which
comes from Langston Hughes this time one of his poems there is a line which simply
says what happens to a dream deferred two of the nation's founders Thomas Jefferson
and John Adams died only hours apart on July 4, 1826 this is one of those really nice
coincidences in American history I think in a poem that he wrote in 1975 called Great
American Fourth of July parade Archibald McLeish portrays Jefferson and Adams
visiting unrecognized a contemporary celebration of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence Jefferson and Adams listened to the poems or attorney who delivers a
patriotic pep talk they also exchange views with his audience observing that Americans
now seem to find Jefferson's philosophy too optimistic Adams nonetheless concludes
with the final word he uttered on his deathbed a century and a half before Jefferson still
lives on that date in 1926 Adams's proposition was literally false it was however
figuratively true and still is but if Americans retain hopeful outlooks their moods often
contrast with the bombast of McLeish's orator's plan which at one point becomes a
hysterical yell the USA is number one the reason for that contrast have much to do with
suspicion that the American dreams expansive sense of possibility may have promised
more but it ever could deliver once United States was a young country with such a vast
expanse of fertile open space and time before it an infinite number of new starts with
conceivable today the nation is no longer young and never will be again it's open space
is mostly taken it's wanted natural plenitude clearly finite it's reputation as a land of
opportunity not quite as exceptional as might be whole once the United States prided
itself not only on the freedom of its individuals but also on the nation's freedom from
foreign entanglements after all Europe was an ocean away and no one had heard of the
Pacific rim now things are different the individual's freedom to be what Walt Whitman
call the simple separate person seems increasingly hamstrung by a bureaucratically
regulated order in the national interest entangles the United States with every other
state in the world once Americans may have been innocent enough to dream that the
nation could not only control its own destiny but that the rest of the world would emulate
its brand of democracy and capitalism parts of that kind of been bolstered by the demise
of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and by upheavals in the Soviet Union but
recently we have learned that even less than superpowers such as North Vietnam and
Iraq can affect American life in ways that we cannot control completely as for global
conversion to democracy and capitalism American-style most prudent thing to say is
that many chapters in that story remain to be written in the ending of the tale is this
problematic as it is unknown nevertheless the truth remains Jefferson still lives he does
so in particular because he wrote and believed that proposition we have noted before
the one that was destined to be as inspiring as it was ambiguous as troublesome as
American practices rendered it ironic all men are created equal to glimpse further how
those dynamics have worked on and through other strands in the American dream
consider that the African-American sociologist W EB deploys believed that the problem
of the 20th century is the problem of the color line he stated that conviction in his 19
three classic called the souls of Black folk which utilizes an image of the video to
designate the racial barrier that has separated whites and blacks on American ground
according to the boys the video is not a stone wall contact occurs among those it hangs
between but it also affects separation thus leading the boys to remind Frederick
Jackson Turner that America is not another word for opportunity to all her sons
speaking well before either Turner or two boys Sojourner Truth abolitionist sister to
Frederick Douglas would've corrected them both look at my arm she had told the
woman's rights convention at Akron Ohio in 1851 look at my arm I have plowed and
planted and gathered into barns and no man could hit me NDI woman I could work as
much and eat as much as any man when I could get it and bear the lashes well and Eli
woman I have born children and Siemens sold into slavery and when I cried out with a
mother's grief none but Jesus heard me and a guy a woman like the brothers and
sisters for whom they spoke boys and truth claim to quality especially equality of
opportunity is there American birthright in the process case in particular is reading of
Thomas Jefferson would not let him settle for less and it put him at odds with the most
formidable black leader of his day Booker T. Washington probably every American
knows about George Washington famous son of Virginia and founding father of the mall
less well known but certainly of great significance is another Virginian who bears the
same surname George Washington was the first president of his country Booker T
Washington was the principle of an Alabama school the former was a slave owner the
latter slave Booker T. Washington was destined to become a leader not a revolution
perhaps and not of an entire nation but like George Washington he did had a cause
aimed at liberty and he worked to achieve national unity by representing and guiding his
people on their way out of American bondage Booker T. Washington's autobiography
called up from slavery and published in 19 one is a post is a puzzling and disturbing
book it portrays the movement of a race but hardly triumph over injustice and
discrimination on a personal level however it is a success story to compare with
Benjamin Franklin's indeed it is a chronicle of advice ambition and compromised that
reveals its author like Franklin to be a man far more complex and controversial than the
simple narrative indicates at first to most Americans if Booker T. Washington is known
of all it is for two things first he was the organizer and longtime leader of Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama beginning in 1881 Washington labored for 34 years to build that
school with its emphasis on industrial training dear African American minds would be
taught to think as well but it was Washington's principle that the place to start and
indeed the model for black education to follow everywhere was that of giving people
labor skills plus a basic knowledge of hygiene and home economics such instruction
would enable them to obtain food and shelter it would make their lives more tolerable
and speed up entrance into the mainstream of American life not yet 40 Booker T.
Washington had the heavy on her responsibility and problem of being the foremost
African-American leader of his day that rule was created for him largely by white opinion
for the nation was weary of the ambiguities unleashed by emancipation the wreckage
left by the Civil War and the turmoil of reconstruction not so differently from today peace
and prosperity were the chief concerns of the fight majority North and South
Washington appeared to be a voice of reason with his plans for educating blacks when
quite support for black causes was forthcoming it tended to support the policies he
advocated thus partly because there was little choice and partly because Washington
could argue his case persuasively by pointing the progress at Tuskegee Institute and
similar institutions and African American majority was willing to follow him to
Washington second distinction then lies in this role it was to be encapsulated in words
spoken on a hot September day in 1895 at the opening of the Atlanta cotton states and
international exposition Washington's autobiography tells the story this was the first time
in the entire history of the Negro that a member of my race had been asked to speak
from the same platform with white Southern men and women on any important national
occasion neither by disposition whereby conviction did Washington think that much was
to be gained by a lashing denunciation of the fight man or by crushing a crushing
speech that would crusade in favor of civil rights he would do the best he could for his
race and the best that he could see as a compromise in all things that are purely social
this fateful formula submitted we can be as separate as the fingers yet one as the hand
in all things essential to mutual progress for a long time such words defined a color line
in the United States and to an extent they still do just a year after Washington's Atlanta
speech for example the Supreme Court gave its decision in the famous case known as
Plessy versus Ferguson that case was provoked by an African-American challenge
which argued that an act of Louisiana's legislature was unconstitutional because it
violated the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution the act in question
required all railroads to provide the call but separate accommodations for blacks and
whites and also forbade intermingling between them writing the Supreme Court's
majority opinion Justice Brown concentrated on the 14th amendment adopted in 1865
that amendment contains five sections the first in particular has come to be vital strand
in the American dream that section states and I'm sure these words will be familiar to
you all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside no state
shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States nor shall any
State deprive any person of life liberty or property without due process of law nor deny
to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law in Plessy versus
Ferguson the court acknowledged that the object of this amendment was undoubtedly
to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law but then Justice Brown
went on to write that in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish
distinctions based upon color or to enforce social as distinguished from political equality
with reference to what Justice Brown called the established usages customs and
traditions of the people the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public
peace and good order the court could not find the Louisiana legislation unreasonable
indeed the decision continued if the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality
it must be the result of natural affinities a mutual appreciation of each other's merits and
the voluntary consent of individuals meanwhile Justice Brown pointed out that what the
court took to be the underlying fallacy of the plaintiffs argument namely that the
enforced separation of the two races stamps the card race with the badge of inferiority
is really something that should be construed as an interpretation that exist simply
because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon significantly the
Supreme Court's decision in Plessy versus Ferguson was not unanimous there was a
lone dissenter Justice John Harlan whose minority opinion anticipated what would come
more than a half-century later in the Supreme Court's 1954 landmark decision in Brown
versus Board of Education of Topeka echoing Justice Harlan's dissent he had written in
Plessy versus versus Ferguson in his opinion that our Constitution is colorblind and
neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens in respect of civil rights all citizens
are equal before the law that was Harlan's dissenting opinion in echoing that opinion
Chief Justice warns opinion in the 1954 case spoke unanimously for that court by
finding that in the field of public education the doctrine of separate but equal has no
place and that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal that decision and its
implications struck a decisive blow though far from the final one against the color line
entrenched by Plessy versus Ferguson of course that line had been entranced well
before Washington's 1895 Atlanta talk or the Supreme Court's 1896 decision clearly
moreover Washington's intention was to soften and blur the color line by encouraging
the idea that blacks and whites could work together thus hastening the end of inequality
and injustice that social separation might apply the whites were sympathetic to this hope
as well but their feelings were not strong enough to overcome more determined
elements white society eagerly interpreted Washington's formula as a mandate for
segregation separate and unequal and Jim Crow from the privileged position of
hindsight it is easy to criticize probably Booker T. Washington did compromise too much
ironically perhaps he did play the hands of black people into new forms of bondage by
catering to naïvely to quite attitudes that supported his own ambitions where those
estimates are valid however they also underscore the two rarely did white intentions
mesh with black faith that the color line should could and would fade away frustrated
black hope and trust the revelation of white souls more racially prejudiced than perhaps
either race expected those factors disclosed dramatically by the workings of Booker T.
Washington's American dream still clutter the way up from slavery to be sure there is
another side of the coin Washington's highest hopes were not simply underachieved
skills were taught respect was sometimes one mutual progress occasionally did occur
and from time to time separation was overcome slowly some African-Americans made
economic headway on the basis that Washington set down and if the viciousness of
racial hatred was never far from erupting Washington's policies at least did not
aggravated he gave breathing room however cramped to a struggling people whose lot
might have been harder under leadership more militant still Washington's hopes which
were largely dreams deferred then and in some ways even now while Booker T.
Washington prepared his Atlanta speech a student worked on a PhD dissertation
entitled the suppression of the African slave trade to the United States 1638 two 1870
the writer was the previously mentioned WT boys and as I have noted already he was to
become the chief African-American adversary to Washington's policies on education
civil rights and economic advancement their backgrounds were very different though he
shared Washington's experience of never knowing a white skinned father the boys was
not born to slavery he spent his youth in Massachusetts and his education took him to
high school and Harvard instead of to salt mines and the industrial training of Hampton
Institute where Booker T. Washington had grown up both men were gifted and
intelligent but Washington's mind was hold more by the need and development of trade
skills than by the classical literature that influenced the boys so much they share the
same basic goal the raising of consciousness and conscience in black and white unlike
so that Americans and indeed men and women everywhere could pursue happiness
without color line restrictions be different however on the means acknowledging the
importance of Washington's plan to work from the bottom up and pushed African
Americans forward by making them evil and cheerful workers to boys nevertheless kept
asking insistently who is going to do the pushing who is going to pull black people up
from slavery the voices proposal put him at odds with Washington the Negro race like
all races said the boys is going to be saved by its exceptional men the problem of
education then among Negroes he argued must first of all to deal with the talented 10th
it is the problem of developing the best of this race that they may guide the mask away
from the contamination and death of the worst in their own and other races this plan is
to boys understood it meant an emphasis on university instruction a stress on liberal
and scientific as well as industrial arts the issues between them moreover did not stop
with education when the boys thought of a talented 10th he envisioned a class of
African-Americans equal in ability and intelligence if not superior to any segment of
white society for such leadership to emerge it simply would not do to allow civil liberties
to be refused or stripped away a talented 10th of second-class citizens was not an
American dream but a nightmare to the boys so he protested Washington's
accommodating politics Booker T. Washington died on American soil still convinced that
his dreams would come true WCB the boys died in Africa early on although in more
guarded ways he had shared some of Washington's optimism but long years of service
as a scholar at Atlanta University organizer and editor for the NAACP political candidate
and writer left him unpersuaded that the wreckage strewn along the color line would be
cleaned up and fairly redressed in the United States as he grew older is political and
economic principles moved to the left advocating socialism as the best way to cope with
poverty and exploitation he was honored in the Communist world while coming under
governmental suspicion at home shortly before his death the boys joined the American
Communist Party and then left the United States to take up citizenship in Ghana he died
there on August 27, 1963 the evil that historic march on Washington that brought you 1
million Americans to the Lincoln Memorial in the name of civil rights this is another
interesting juxtaposition of events and dates perhaps the boys died on haunted by the
ghost of his own untrue dreams in a way unimaginable for Booker T. Washington but
just as the latter's visions haunt America with their simple hope so easily betrayed the
boys's objectives at least his earlier ones form indictment still to be reckoned with the
boys used historical and sociological studies to shed light on the predicaments and
promises of American life is early training at Harvard was in philosophy his teachers
included George Santiago and William James and we have met before in the series the
boys remained a philosopher but he also reports an early decision to turn back as he
said from the lovely but sterile land of philosophic speculation to the social sciences as
the field for gathering and interpreting that body of fact which would apply to my
program the boys did pioneering social scientific work as he explored the lives of African
Americans in Philadelphia the history and structure of religious life in African-American
communities and a host of other topics were the boys alive in 1991 his sociological
studies might explore why the United States sends people to prison at rates four times
greater than most Western European European or Asian countries in particular he might
explore why no country not even South Africa incarcerates more black meals than the
United States one of many factors that leads some contemporary social scientists say
that in spite of the fact that there are presently over 14 million of them African-American
males nevertheless run the risk of becoming an endangered species or to boys might
be drawn to consider how universities and their big-time sports programs to intertwined
installed with that enticing American dream of the lucrative career in professional
athletics of major college football and basketball players only about 1% make it
meanwhile the big-time football and basketball programs that seem to offer black
athletes away out of dead-end streets can turn out to be dead ends of their own too
often no pro career is matched by two little education worthy of the name and no
diploma the graduation rates for black athletes in big-time college sports are only about
25% for football players and even less basketball whatever the boys might have studied
one of his consistent games was to show in his words how Negro blood has a message
for the world the results were sociology that combines statistics with the emotions of
song sweat and struggle a history that made the facts and feelings of color illuminate
each other best divorce concluded his book the souls of Black folk with a chapter on the
sorrow songs referring to many of the spirituals that continue to influence American
music religion and politics uses epigraphs for his chapters in that book of good music
syntax from the eco-spiritual the boys assault songs saying about exile poverty flight
and freedom strife and death but those themes are the beginning not the end four
through all the sorrow of the file songs to boys rights there breathes a hold a faith in the
ultimate justice of things the boys as meditation proceeds to ask whether that hope is
justified whether the sorrow songs seem true his answer however had been given
before the asking understanding the voices protesting grief over his sons untimely death
this little boy might have seen the veil lifted old boys understood the chance was slim
refusal to settle for that outcome however ultimately shines through in the voices were
surely he protests surely this is not the end surely there shall yet gone some mighty
morning to lift the veil and set the present free a morning when men ask of the workmen
not if he quite but can he work when men ask artists not are they black but do they
know speaking nearly a century later Shelby Steele echoes the boys the author of a
1990 work called the content of our character a new vision of race in America which is
controversial because of its criticisms of affirmative action programs shall be steel says I
want to come in the door on the same standards that everybody else came in the door
on so that you then have to look at my work and see whether it stacks up and then I'll
know if you have a glass ceiling there that it's racism if the voices and steals American
dream has not been disproven neither has it been fully confirm experiencing the ironic
gap between what America offered and what it's black citizens received the boys
contended with a dream deferred that phrase was deftly coined by another African-
American Langston Hughes who along with Archibald McLeish probably uses the
concept of the American dream more overtly and often than any other American poets
America Hughes wrote in 1938 never was America to me and yet I swear this old
America will be it's dream lies deep in the heart of me like the boys Hughes knew this
also he heard them Harlem style in the jazz riffs and blues that inspired his verse the
boys had told his white readers how discouraging it was for blacks to live haunted by
the ghost of an untrue dream Hughes did not forsake his bow America will be but by
1951 he had to ask what happens to a dream deferred Hughes's response steeped in
an anger frustrated impatient and yet hopeful all at once supplied the unsettling
correction a dream deferred he was warned might well explode Hughes's premonition
hit the target by midcentury the struggle for racial equality heated up erupting violently
across the land in Newark Detroit Watson elsewhere during the 1960s early on Hughes
had identified some of the reasons then and now an American dream deferred will keep
the have-nots tantalized with hope still seeking what they do not possess a certain
amount of nothing as Hughes called the makes their self-determination impotent
because the powers insist on asking not candy work or does she know but are they
quite if all men and women however are created equal and granted certain unalienable
rights by God including those to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness such results are
bound to cause confusion the confusion they breed more over tears between despair in
rage either is more than sufficient to unleash violence comes a time when the cup of
endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of
despair recent studies suggest that Martin Luther King Jr. had his flaws his doctoral
dissertation he may even have cited the words of others without the proper scholarly
attributions but the passage I have just quoted is one that is unmistakably his own for it
was written on April 16, 1963 in the Birmingham jail cell where King was under arrest for
his civil rights activities King was not opposed to letting a dream deferred explode but
that explosion counsel must be governed either by despair nor by rate had to clear a
path of resistance that would heal not deepen the wounds of inequality the time was
right to take self-conscious self-controlled action to make America live the meaning of
its creed king thought so he rejected the view that he was pressing too hard and fast for
fundamental changes in American life weight which came to be the codeword for never
meant a dream deferred that painful realization he went on to say contained in
unforgettable lesson freedom wrote King is never voluntarily given by the oppressor it
must be demanded by the oppressed campaigns of nonviolent resistance succeeded in
rending part of the video of race in the United States but his hopes to be named in part
a dream deferred as King himself predicted he never got to the promised land
assassin's bullet in Memphis saw to that in the longer run however everything depends
on whether King despite his realistic views of what happens when human life is infested
with racism was still too optimistic in spite of his tough appraisal that those holding
privileges dependent on the color line never give up their prerogatives easily king
proclaimed that I still have a dream America's hard one heritage of freedom he believed
is ultimately more powerful that our traditions of cruelty and injustice hence King
affirmed Justice shall prevail here thus far in advance have not proved King completely
correct but will King's confidence yet be more or less justified will American ground from
every mountainside let Rita Marine answers to those questions are ironically deferred
because they cannot be written in black and white alone the veil of race is woven of
many multicolored strands nor does the complexity and with skin color and race alone
American ground is peopled by Asians and Latinos of diverse traditions Arabs and Jews
of varied persuasion as well as by the multiple Native American cultures that were here
long before the hordes of ethnically different Europeans and Africans arrived the
varieties of heritage and lifestyle in America have of course often been celebrated in the
United States indeed Herman Melville the author of that American classic Moby Dick
may have been correct when Annette in another oven of his novels one called Redbird
he proclaimed the Following Rd., Melville there is something in the contemplation of the
mode in which America has been settled that in a noble breast should forever extinguish
the prejudices of national dislikes settled by the people of all nations all nations may
clean her for their own you cannot spill a drop of American Blood Rd., Melville without
spilling the blood of the whole world we are not a narrow tribe know our blood is as the
flood of the Amazon made up of 1000 noble currents all pouring into one we are not a
nation so much as a world nevertheless the diversity of which Melville spoke often
makes living together harder for Americans not easier Melville to the contrary
notwithstanding one reason is that these domestic relationships which are never very
far removed from the color line have international implications Americans see each
other not to mention the country as a whole in foreign affairs American foreign policy is
influenced by ethnic coalitions and rivalries within the nation's borders the factors noted
this far would be more than enough to guarantee that the domestic tranquility promised
by the American Constitution is much more to be wished for them to be taken for
granted yet no appraisal of the state of the union could begin to be complete if you
ignore the fact that Americans are divided not only by color and race ethnicity and
culture but also by that most fundamental natural difference of all the one between male
and female here too there are varied rivalries and coalitions all of them affected by the
particularities of their constituents lately the resulting stew bubbles in a pressure cooker
suggesting that novelist Thomas Wolfe Silas situation clearly in his 1940 novel called
you can't go home again the true discovery of America wrote Wolf is before us a century
and a half after Alexis de Tocqueville took the pulse of democracy in the United States a
writer named studs Terkel made his own survey of American ground earlier in a book
called working he had appraised American attitudes toward work this time his project
broadened to evaluate American dreams lost and found his book was titled reporting
trickles interviews with men and women young and old from diverse geographical
regions economic classes and ethnic backgrounds that each thoroughly American the
book displayed what Americans in the early 1980s thought about their homeland and its
future three samples illustrate further themes pertaining two dreams deferred Seattle
residents are key and June Crusade American citizens are nisei second-generation
Japanese immigrants their civil rights were violated by internment in an American
concentration camp during World War II but that experience is not the only one that has
taught them how far the veal race extends a schoolteacher hockey crusade once asked
whether her school's library could get some books about Japanese-American history the
librarians not so innocent response was a question why do you have to bring up the
past Ramona Bennett appeared INDIAN health Mrs. Curtis a supply the answer they
concur that the typical history officially packaged for American school is still white male
dominated it's curious what most needs honest illumination and ironically too few are
the wiser take for example violated treaties trusting pew ACCEPTED reservation status
from the United States government in Bennett's experience however reservation never
meant preservation the government persuaded people that its encroachments were at
least virtuous necessities if not obviously warranted rights stripped of its irony what
happened since Ramona Bennett simply as we had land the whites wanted land
Stephen Cruise might add is not all they wanted his grandparents entered the United
States when he puts it controls at the border didn't exist as they do now their grandson
did well graduated college with a degree in engineering where the box were the early
60s then did graduate work in business got 14 job offers took the one from Procter &
Gamble and was on his way irony and with his recognition of ambivalence began to
intrude how much did his advancement have to do with his abilities he wondered and
how much did it have to do with his being a minority no hypocrite crews did not deplore
the civil rights acts that were raising his chances he just was unsure whether his own
success reflected a real change of spirit in the United States or whether it was an
indication that the letter of the law was being fulfilled for the white domination could be
maintained every time I turned around he told Turkel America seem to be treating me
very well admitting that he felt a real internal conflict between the temptations of
financial gain and the lure of integrity crews eventually decided that America was
treating him a little too well for his or the nations good finding the established power
conferred so much on him but so little on others who were on the wrong side of the
color line the young man concluded that his success unfortunately was symptomatic
that America is ruled as he put it by the fear of losing convinced that a counter power
was needed crews set aside his corporate image and became a teacher Adrienne Rich
an ardent American feminist poet scan similar terrain from an old house in America as
she calls one of her poems but she also use it differently she likens the body of a
pioneer American woman to a hollow ship bearing sons to the wilderness daughters
whose juices drain like mine into the Arroyo of stillbirths massacres as Sojourner Truth
and Harriet Tubman Angelina and Sarah Grimke Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane
Addams Betty Frieden and Molly Yard would join countless others to testify the nation
has not treated its women too well at least not enough of them if WB to boys was
correct to dissent from Turner America has not been another word for opportunity to all
her sons that indictment seems to ring even truer for their sisters mothers and
daughters the domestic separation of powers which contends left American women in a
lonely savagely fathered land where they got more than their fair share of suffering less
than their equitable portion of liberty to say nothing of satisfaction richest: however is no
man heating recital of complaint and resentment it celebrates the resourceful endurance
of American women the know-how and determination embodied in an born through the
frontier woman leveling her rifle along the Homestead fence urging the American
woman and by implication all Americans to come to terms with the women in the mirror
Rich hopes they will activate untapped power to soften fairly if not to a race altogether
the lines that divide so much so needlessly and destructively to the extent that they do
we are she suggests in the open on her way at that of many others whose voices have
been represented in this particular lecture richest date in the future shows that her old
house as foundations deeply grounded in the American dream whether they stand on
solid walk or run shifting sand however remains undetermined the dream is still in the
making and in disturbing ways to as the next lecture suggest by probing American
dreamsLecture

Lecture 7: The dream and the Holocaust

Him a topic for this lecture on calling American dreams and Holocaust questions and
the opening quotation that I'd like to start with comes from one of our distinguished
American citizens demanding Kelly we sell I happens to be a survivor of Auschwitz and
also in 1986 I received the Nobel Peace Prize in one of his essays he makes this
statement the Holocaust he says demands interrogation and calls everything into
question traditional ideas and acquired values philosophical systems and social theories
all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau I'll come back to that statement in just a
little bit but I want to begin by mentioning a phrase from a book that is a very interesting
study of the Holocaust it's called into that darkness and it was written by a journalist
scholar by the name of Gita syringe in this book she carried on a series of interviews
with of fascinating and very problematic man by the name of Franz Stangl front staying
had the dubious distinction of being the commandant of not one but two of the Nazi
death camps in Poland he was the chief administrator for time at camp called so before
and later at a camp called Treblinka he had escaped to South America but was found
there and eventually extradited back to the West Germany at the time and that he stood
trial there is a war criminal was convicted and given a life sentence in prison argue the
serenity was present at the trial of Franz Stangl in Germany and not as a journalist she
got the idea that there really was a very important story to track down a more detailed in
her journalistic assignment would permit and so she set herself the task of trying to
interview him more extensively and then to write a book about him and his experiences
in the process she interviewed a lot of his family and his associates and a lot of other
people were involved in some of the activities that he engaged in in this book as she
sums up what she found she stresses the following kind of general points individuals
remain responsible for their action and its consequences but persons are and must be
responsible for each other to what we do as individuals she contends at the end is
deeply vulnerable and profoundly dependent on a climate of life that reflects the fetal
interdependence of all human actions and that last is the phrase the fetal
interdependence of all human actions I first read that book and that freeze of nearly 20
years ago and now it's stuck with me and it has served as a kind of principle governs a
lot of my thinking the fetal interdependence of all human actions if Jesus or any was
correct to speak about that relationship the fatal interdependence of all human actions
and I think that she was correct then how might American dreams and Holocaust
questions be related that's a question that keeps moving me one reason is illustrated by
Sting go the young American dreamer whose voyage of discovery is William Styron
describes it fills the pages of his controversy over novel called Sophie's choice initiated
by Sophie Zala style Scott a fictional Polish Catholic who likes thousands of her actual
Polish sisters and brothers experienced Auschwitz Sting go in 1947 learns about a
world very different from his own as Sophie story unfold sting go on go undergoes
shocks of recognition including as he relates the incident the absurd fact that on that
afternoon as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz it was a lovely
spring morning in Raleigh North Carolina where I was gorging myself on bananas on
that day Styron says it was April Fools' Day 1943 Sting go was 17 he was desperately
trying to make the weight requirement for enlistment into the United States Marines he
squeaked by he had never heard of Auschwitz American dreams and Holocaust
questions in some ways these dimensions of life are as different as the experiences of
Sophie and stinko in April 1943 and yet those realities intersect and challenge each
other in ways that can make one wonder Inspiron's novel about Sophie soused Oscar
stinko meets her in a place as strange as Brooklyn but their shared experience climaxes
in Washington DC we walked through the evening in total silence single recalls it was
plain that Sophie and I could appreciate neither the symmetry of the city nor its air of
wholesome and benevolent piece Washington suddenly appeared. Diplomatically
American sterile geometrical unreal Auschwitz realized stinko stocked my soul as well
as hers was there no end to this he wondered no and what if Auschwitz stocks our souls
to what would that presence do two American dreams the Holocaust demands
interrogation and calls everything into question traditional ideas and required values
philosophical systems and social theories all must be revised in the shadow of Birkenau
Birkenau was the killing center at Auschwitz and those words that I've cited again are
telling the sales Jewish survivor of Auschwitz distinguished author in humanitarian
Nobel laureate workpiece Ellie we sell is also an American he seeks understanding but
not too much while wanting people to study the Holocaust he alerts them to the dangers
of thinking that they do or can or even should know everything about it he stresses as
that court suggests that whatever the Trish traditional ideas and acquired values that
have existed whatever the philosophical systems and social theories that human minds
have produced whatever the dreams that have been dreaming they either helped pave
the way to Auschwitz or proved inadequate to block the way to that place soon enough
granted American attention could not have been completely focused on the European
situation because the United States was waging a massive war against Japan in the
Pacific among the shadows of that campaign however something closer to home bears
remembering it has been portrayed in a recent film for example called come see the
paradise authorized by an executive order signed by Pres. Franklin D Roosevelt on
February 19, 1942 just a few weeks after Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor the federal
government supposedly to forestall possible attacks by Japanese agents against
strategic installations in the United States the government took action to relocate about
120,000 ordinary citizens and immigrants of Japanese descent into 10 concentration
camps the internment's legality was contested in the courts but Justice Murphy's
comment that the evacuation for a melancholy resemblance to the Nazis treatment of
the Jews notwithstanding the Supreme Court finally ruled that the military under certain
special circumstances as the legal right to discriminate against certain groups of citizens
based on their ethnic background troubling precedents lurk in that decision among them
the court silence about the inconsistency between such a ruling in the 14th amendment
to the Constitution which guarantees citizens equal protection of the laws it's important
to stress that man's an art and the other internment camps did not become an
Auschwitz American policy was far removed from Nazi genocide in addition a civil
liberties act past however only in 1988 lead in October 1992 the first distribution of 1 1/2
billion dollars in government reparations which will provide checks of about $20,000 and
a presidential apology to the more than 60,000 surviving internees or heirs of those who
were still living when the law was enacted yet as John done the Justice Department
official who supervised the redress effort has said the injustice of the forced evacuation
entertainment citizens without due process of the law was a constitutional travesty
eventually American military might brought not only Japanese surrender but it also
proved essential to bringing the third Reich to its knees yet even if the history cannot be
detailed here it also bears remembering that David Wyman the leading authority on the
subject hits the target when he writes about the abandonment of the Jews by the United
States during the Hitler era in the late 1930s restrictive immigration possible possibilities
meant that the American dream of Emma Lazarus the poet whose words give me your
tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free which are words inscribed
on the Statue of Liberty restrictive immigration policies in the 1930s meant that people
who might have come here would find that dream tragically deferred in ways that would
be deadly negative attitudes toward Jews Wyman shows his research penetrated all
sectors of wartime America even after public governmental acknowledgment in
December 1942 that the Jews were being slaughtered in Moss the government was not
moved to take action specifically directed at alleviating Jewish plight not least of the
reasons for that inaction was American anti-Semitism according to Wyman polls taken
from August 1940 until the wars and showed that 15 to 24% of the respondents looked
upon Jews as "menace to America such ingredients conspired to yield a record less
noble then the American dream might like to envision nor does Birkenau shadow on
American ground stop there a man by the name of Alan Ryan for example who headed
up investigations carried out by the United States Department of Justice has written a
book about Nazi war criminals who entered the United States and his conclusion about
his findings is that United States government didn't do a particularly good job in I'm
trying to screen out and identify a lot of those people such a report would have
saddened but not surprised novelist Ralph Ellison whom we have heard before in 1945
he was working on a different narrative when what he identifies as blues tone laughter
began to dominate his imagination eventually the laughter that he heard in this voice
that was running through his imagination compelled him to give all expression to its
voice which belonged to the invisible man who had been forged Ellison noted in the
underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic
the story that the Ellison set aside in order to work on the novel that became his classic
invisible man was to be about a pilot who had been downed by the Luftwaffe and
interned in a Nazi POW camp this pilot was the highest ranking officer in the group of
prisoners it happened to be in this particular place as Allison's story plot unfolded and
so owing to the conventions of war he would be the spokesman for his fellow prisoners
Mike Ellison himself the pilot that he was writing about was black prisoner of racists and
also the leader of prisoners who in normal American circumstances would not see them
as equal let alone as their superior Ellison's pilot would have to navigate his way
between the democratic ideals he affirmed and the prevailing mystique of race and color
this dilemma Ellison went on to say when he was I'm telling about this postponed story
the side of this dilemma was to be given a further twist of the screw by the pilots
awareness that once the peace was signed the German camp commander could
immigrate to the United States and immediately take advantage of freedoms that would
be denied to the pilot if Ralph Ellison never finish that story his pilot's voice like that of
invisible man would seem to echo Langston Hughes is: let America be America again
oh yes I say it plain accuse America never was America to me and yet I swear this old
America will be it's dream lies in the heart of me Ellison's novel invisible man ends
where it begins this unnamed characters in the underground hideout where American
experience has driven him he is awakening from a state of hibernation as he calls it in
his awakening entails writing thus in the novel's epilogue which to my mind is one of the
most brilliant pieces of American writing I know Ellison expresses his characters outlook
as follows and I think I feel hear these words a container rather a remarkable a
philosophy so why do I write Nelson has this invisible man think to himself torturing
myself to put it down because in spite of myself I've learned some things without the
possibility of action all knowledge comes to one labeled file and forget and I can neither
file nor forget normal certain ideas forget me they keep filing away at my lethargy my
complacency so it is that now I denounce and defend or feel prepared to defend I
condemn in the firm say no and say yes say yes and say no I denounced because
though implicated in partially responsible I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain
Kirk to the point of invisibility and I defend because in spite of all I find that I love in
order to get some of it down I have to love I sell you know phony forgiveness I'm a
desperate man but too much of your life will be lost it's meaning lost unless you
approach it as much love as through eight so I approach it through division so I
denounce and I defend and I hate and I love Ralph Ellison's emphasis on diversity and
his approach through division resonate with Elie Wiesel yells insistence that the shadow
of Birkenau warns against placing too much confidence in answers typically however
the human propensity seems to be request for certainty we cells urging the questions he
contends the questions must remain questions is to resist that temptation especially
when it aims to settle things that ought to remain unsettled and unsettling what we sell
and others I think have led us to see is that the Holocaust happened in a way because
Hitler in the minds that he persuaded seem to have confidence that they understood
that one religion had superseded another they comprehended that one race was
superior to every other they saw what nature's laws decreed namely that there was
what in German was called Lehmans their case Laban life unworthy of life thus they
realized who deserve to live and who deserved to die Hitler and his Nazi followers knew
they were right there knowing made them killers before it was too late questioning might
have redeemed those who became the killers and their victims as Allison Hughes
Styron and others help to show destructive qualities of mind certainly not identical but
still akin to those that took Ellie Mazel to Auschwitz also have scarred American ground
from time to time they led Ellison's invisible Man to remark any speaks for more than
himself that I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing all the
same time cold empty bed Springs heart is led pains in my head feel like old man what
did I do to be so black and blue no Joyce for me no company even the mouse ran from
my house all my life through I've been so black and blue I'm quite inside don't help my
case because I can't hide what is on my face I'm so forlorn life's just before my hardest
tour why was I born what did I do to be so black and blue the shadow of Birkenau
questions the American dream in William Styron's story about Sophie soused Oscar an
SS doctor gave her a choice list choice she could pick which of her two children Jan or
Eva should go to the gas-ish conversation with a she screamed Sophie could not
choose and yet so as not to lose them both she let even go limited though it was
Sophie's choice was real so was her sense of guilt set free in 1945 she found her way to
the United States but as the lyric from Les Miserables so aptly states there are dreams
that cannot be and there are storms we cannot weather liberation left Sophie in the
shadow of Birkenau she found inescapable conclusion that her own life even in America
where she hoped for a new beginning was not worth living in 1947 Sophie let it go to
also by choice and Sophie Sallust also got been a Jew she would've had no choice for
Hitler's racist anti-Semitism and the power of his Nazi state destined all juice for
annihilation such facts have prompted another of the nation's eminent Jewish thinkers
Richard Rubinstein to write a book called the cunning of history the Holocaust and the
American future there he wonders about the truth that Thomas Jefferson taught
Americans to hold self-evident as we have noted before in this lecture series none of
those truth is more crucial to the American dream than the claim that persons are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights those rights Jefferson believed
are not merely legal privileges that people grant to each other as they please rather his
philosophy held reason rightly used shows such rights are natural part and parcel of
what is meant by human existence they belong equally to all humanity and presumably
cannot be violated with impunity nonetheless the sense in which rights are unalienable
inviolable absolute unassailable inherent is an elusive part of Jefferson's declaration
which also states that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men
apparently unalienable rights are not invulnerable but if they are not invulnerable and in
what way are they unalienable one important answer could be that what he is and what
ought to be are clearly not the same and reason can make the distinction to speak of
unalienable rights therefore is to speak of conditions of existence so basic that they
ought never to be abrogated persuasive though it may be such reasoning may still give
too little comfort rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness are qualified repeatedly
even by governments that seek to secure them far more radically Auschwitz questions
what we might call the functional status of unalienable rights in Rubenstein's words for
example the Holocaust and genocide in other related instances of population riddance
suggest that there are absolutely no limits to the degradation and assault the managers
and technicians of violence can inflict upon men and women lack the power of effective
resistance true many say that certain rights must not be reserved still if those rights are
violated completely and all too often with impunity and they are how can they
convincingly be called natural or unalienable is that not one more idealistic illusion
another instance of how the American dream may obscure reality Rubenstein's
proposition about these matters is certainly arguable but he contends that greater
credibility is found when one concludes that rights do not belong to man by nature to the
extent that men have writes Rubenstein argues they have them only as members of the
polis the political community outside of the polis there are no inboard restraints on the
human exercise of destructive power a man named Hans Meyer new to well whereof
Richard Rubenstein speaks born on October 31, 1912 the only child of a Catholic
mother and a Jewish father more than anything else on his Meyer thought of himself as
an Austrian not least because his father's family had lived in that country since the 17th
century Hans Meyer however lived in the 20th century and thus it was that in September
1935 he studied in newspapers in a Viennese coffeehouse the Nuremberg laws had just
been promulgated in Nazi Germany Myers reading made him see unmistakably the fetal
interdependence of all human actions even if he did not think of himself as Jewish the
Nazis definitions meant that the cunning of history that nonetheless given him that
identity Meyer lacked the authority to define social reality in the mid-1930s but
increasingly the Nazi state did possess such power it's laws made Meyer Jewish even if
his own consciousness did not as he confronted that reality the unavoidable it gave his
being Jewish took on another dimension by identifying him as a Jew Meyer would write
later on Nazi power made him a dead man on the someone to be murdered only by
chance was not yet working properly belong when Nazi Germany occupied Austria in
March 1938 Meyer drew his conclusions he fled from his native land and went to
Belgium join the resistance after Belgium was swept into the third Reich in 1940 he was
captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and the Nazis sent him to a series of camps including
Auschwitz before he was liberated from a place called Dragon Belson in 1945
eventually taking the name Jean Amery by which he is remembered this philosopher
waited 20 years before breaking his silence about the Holocaust when Amery did
decide to write the result was a series of remarkable essays about the Holocaust of his
experiences in one of these essays is simply entitled torture torture drove Amery to the
following observation the expectation of help the certainty of help he wrote is indeed
one of the fundamental experiences of human beings thus the grievous loss produced
by the Holocaust Amery went on to suggest was that it destroyed what he called trust in
the world the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other
person will spare me more precisely stated that he will respect my physical and with it
also my metaphysical being Jean Amery would wonder about the American dream its
affirmations about unalienable rights and its hopes for new beginnings every morning
when I get up each tells his readers I can read the Auschwitz number on my forearm
every day and knew I lose my trust in the world declarations of human rights he wrote
democratic constitutions the free world in the Free Press nothing he went on to say
nothing can lull me into the slumber of security for which I awoke in 1935 far from
scoring the human dignity that those institutions emphasized the rate you're in for the
right to live which he equated with dignity itself his experience however taught him that
is certainly true that dignity can be bestowed only by society whether it be the dignity of
some office professional or very generally speaking civil dignity and the merely
individual subjective claim he went on to say I am a human being and as such I have
my dignity matter what you may say or do is an empty academic game or madness
lucidity believed Amery demanded the recognition of this reality but lucidity did not end
there he thought it also entailed rebellion against power that would make anyone a dead
man on the unfortunately it must also be acknowledged that Amery's hopes for such
protest were less than optimistic on October 17, 1978 he also took leave and became a
dead man by his own hand Amery's testimony tests assumptions that have long been at
the heart of the American dream they include beliefs that the most basic human rights
are gift of God and the nature and reason testify to a universal moral structure which
underwrites them but what if there is no God what if nature is a more granting that
reason can make critical distinctions between what he is and what ought to be what if
reason also insists that the most telling truth of all is that history is what Hegel the 19th
century German philosopher called it a slaughter bench a realm where unalienable
rights are hardly worth the paper they're written on unless political might insurers such
questions have crossed American minds in the past but in a post-Holocaust age the
cross examine American optimism more severely than before for it is no longer clear
that anything but human power does secure persons rights and rights depend on
human power alone then they may well be natural and unalienable in name only in such
circumstances to call rights unalienable may still be a legitimate rhetorical bot device
could muster consensus that certain privileges and prerogatives must not be taken
away no doubt the idea of unalienable rights functions and will continue to do so
precisely in that way as an ingredient in the American dream but ideas do not
necessarily correspond to waking life any more than dreams do it appears increasingly
that rights are functionally unalienable which may be what counts most in the long and
short of it only within a state that will successfully defend honor them as such dreams
die hard in America in Sophie's choice sting go the white Presbyterian southerner
cannot prevent Sophie's suicide but Stangl endures having learned much about himself
and about his own American dream three fragments from a journal he kept in 1947 form
the novel's conclusion someday I will understand Auschwitz Stangl had written like
many American dreams that Val Stangl reflects years later is innocently absurd let your
love flow out on all living things that fragment seems one more were saving to sting go
as a reminder of some fragile hope and finally there is some poetry Nice cold sand I
dreamed of death but woke at dawn to see him glory the bright the MorningStar faced
with a choice between determination and despair staying though the American chooses
hope the freedom to choose destroyed Sophie apparently single will try to resist that
fate by using choice against itself in a struggle to make life more worth living and not
less so some years later Harry Engstrom and his wife Janice the principal characters in
rabbit run rabbit red X rabbit is Rich and rabbit at rest John Updike's four volume saga
about the ups and downs American life since World War II some years later hearing
Angstrom and Janice are struggling toward that same destination in rabbit run the
earliest of the four novels Harry suffers from a closed in feeling as he calls it a former
high school basketball star the rabbit has since experienced only mediocrity and here
he cannot abide mediocrity consequently like earlier Americans he runs the trouble is he
doesn't know quite where to run to Kerry has a son Nelson any fathers a daughter
Becky who drowns while still an infant Gary also takes up with a prostitute named Ruth
and gets her pregnant nearly 20 years later in rabbit is Rich Kerry thinks he needs his
other daughter but he never knows for sure meanwhile the institution's domestic social
religious that the younger Harry has been brought up to believe in fail to satisfy him yet
he can find no adequate replacements no new frontiers where he can fan the little flame
inside him the second novel rabbit red ox unfolds as America's involvement in Vietnam
is the most strenuously criticized but Kerry is not one of the critics desperate to believe
in something Harry substitutes America for a face of God and stubbornly defends the
Vietnam war America he thinks is beyond power it acts as in a dream wherever America
is there is freedom beneath her patient bombers Paradise is possible the America Kerry
truly believes in however is an older America which is he nostalgically remembers it was
epitomized by family solidarity Sunday morning church and Sunday afternoon baseball
it is not the nation inhabits in the late 1960s America has penetrated outer space but the
Kerry has failed to fill it spiritual void in the course of the novel Harry struggles to come
to terms with his feelings not only about Vietnam but also about the sexual revolution
the civil rights movement the new technology that has threatened his employment and a
host of other things at the end of rabbit red ox Herrion Janice estranged from time to
time are back together tenuously reunited they are not sure this will make things better
not even for themselves let alone the country if it was better Harry says of the United
States I'd have to be better but Harry and Janice are trying they are conducting a vigil
they're waiting to see how do you think it's going very asked Janice there she replies a
decade later Updike affirms that rabbit is Rich now his mid-40s Harry manages Springer
motors his wife's family business and prospers by selling Japanese Toyotas buyers in
his hometown Brewer Pennsylvania Harry has a country club membership in a new
house is frequently rocky marriage seems to have stabilized Terry who thought God
never wanted him to have a daughter has a new granddaughter to the series
contentment is not complete rabbit cares and so he still has reasons to wonder as he
puts it whether the Great American writers ending at least for Kerry's votes went to
Ronald Reagan and George Bush the ride is ending with rabbit at rest although Harry
now spends half the year in Florida retirement Updike's title is ironic because Harry is
found very little domestic tranquility Springer motors in his son's family life are both in
trouble because Nelson who ineptly manages both is hooked on cocaine overweight
and out of weight and out of shape himself Harry seems nearly unable to find the flame
any longer let alone to fan for his heart is failing meanwhile not exactly to Harry's
comfort Janice is found a new lease on life with a career in real estate increasingly hairy
seems preoccupied with the ending of his life at the fringes of Harry's diminished moods
of stirred up unsatisfied desire writes Updike licks the depressing idea that nothing
matters very much will all soon be dead and yet in spite of Harry's fighting energy in a
way even because of it his dissatisfaction his yearnings for something better do reassert
themselves although Harry wonders how many fresh starts for him our last and despite
the fact that his life is hardly been a paradigm of order and responsibility he keeps
insisting that we've got to get some order going in this crazy family there comes a time
when you got to take responsibility Harry's rest does come the last words John Updike
gives him our reply to Nelson's cry don't die dad don't well Nelson he says all I can tell
you is it isn't so bad to which Updike ends in concluding the novel rabbit thinks he
should say more the kid looks wildly expectant but enough maybe enough how do you
think it's going Harry once asked Janice there she replied enough how do you think it's
going does Janice's appraisal fit the American dream today even if the answer is only
fair Americans ought not this claimant for if Americans are no longer so certain that their
multifaceted American dream is realizable that the future and its possibilities for
favorable new beginnings are limitless it just might be a sign that the and their American
dream have grown up last what Americans aren't have been as well as what they dream
of becoming is the truth they must live by if that is where we had if that is where we are
going where we have been has its virtues to such a complex fate is worth having is a
gift to share and possess with care these thoughts weaved together themes and texts
from two courses I've offered for a long time one of them I call perspectives on the
American dream and that's been the main source for a lot that we've done in the series
but the other is from a course that has been one of long-standing interest to me which
focuses on on the Holocaust most of the students I teach take at least one of them and
some of them are real gluttons for punishment they end up taking them both in
preparation for this lecture in particular I asked some of my students how they thought
the strands in these two courses might relate if they do it all a common response held at
the two courses worked in Camden in tandem to make me think or make me question
things and not accept things as they happen as for what the courses meet the students
think about in question one writer spoke for several others by asserting that the
Holocaust in the history of American experience both yield remorseful reflection and
also hope for the future the Holocaust demonstrated the horror that men could inflict
upon each other while also showing the courage and resiliency of the people who were
victimized the history of the American dream provide some of these same lessons a
second commentator observed like Ellison's invisible Man we started out with our share
of optimism and ended up with a world of infinite possibilities but we are not back where
we started and a third responding specifically to the Holocaust said I don't think that we
can overcome evil I don't think that I see it happen but that doesn't matter I feel that I
can help to start such remarks resound rhythm that I think can be helpful in coming to
terms with American identity and with the American dream in particular perspectives on
the American dream starts with young Americans who brim with optimism as perhaps
they should the counterpart for students who begin to encounter the shadow of
Birkenau is shock even if they already bring some knowledge of the Holocaust to their
study the shock predicated in part on American optimism evolves toward despair as we
trace the twisted road to Auschwitz the winds through Western civilization meanwhile
perspectives on the American dream have moved from optimism to some
disillusionment as discoveries multiply about dreams that cannot be and storms we
cannot weather disillusionment and despair however neither deserve nor get the final
word taking to heart Elie Wiesel tells reminder and yet and yet he says this is the key
expression in my work taking to heart that reminder determination emerges choose life
and not to end it one student put it this way there must've been something worthy of
love Ellison's invisible Man was able through division to find we cannot love evil and we
cannot not love so we must approach America through the vision answer possibility
another students spent time doing a detailed study of how the Nazis treated
handicapped Germans in the third Reich which is really where the final solution began
and eradicate handicapped people who were German themselves because they weren't
somehow going to contribute to the master race this particular student has spent a
number of summers working in her hometown of Phoenix Arizona with handicapped
people and as she did the study on what the Nazis had done to their handicapped
people she said that she learned something that for time she worked her summer job
should been struck by how bureaucratic some of the some of the rules were that she
was instructed that she must ask people maybe weren't even capable of replying
whether they wanted to do something or not and she said her study had led her to see
that those bureaucratic rules weren't so bureaucratic after all what they were intended to
do was to keep confirming the basic humanity of people meeting were incapacitated
and could not act as they might wish to so she said summing up her basic point in way
that I won't soon forget the simplest task the suddenly significant in equal simplicity
Jean Amery summed up his contemplations on the Holocaust what happened
happened he wrote but that it happened cannot be so easily accepted another student
might be echoing him when she responded study of the Holocaust is both shocking and
powerful to begin to understand requires the removal of the veil of naïveté and we all
carry it is not easy but it is necessary the American dream is closer to home for most of
us it is also less morally debilitating but there are still flaws we are nowhere near perfect
and it is sometimes hard to realize this balancing realism and optimism is tough new
beginnings in the cunning of history trust in torture Raleigh North Carolina Auschwitz
Poland Washington DC the right to life and life unworthy of life into that darkness in the
bright the MorningStar loving heating saying yes and saying no denouncing defending
dividing and yet and yet American dreams Holocaust questions the fatal
interdependence of all human actions the Earth is woven of many strands free porn
needs demanding that depends on resisting with undeceived lucidity the shadow of
Birkenau and its destructive legacy stripped of illusions but not necessarily of American
dreams for good the world still awaits

Lecture 8 : where have we been

Hi I hope you detected in the tone in the content of what I've tried to say that I am
deeply engaged in a tradition that exists in this country which I think can be described
as a as a lover's quarrel with my own country I think that's a healthy relationship to have
it to know all lovers are in probably quarrelsome relationship to some degree and not
there certainly is a long tradition of that United States we've heard a lot of echoes of a
Hawthorne Whitman Emerson Monroe Jefferson Lincoln on and on it goes and done
that's that's the tone that I hope you've heard from me with you agree with it or not I
leave to you to decide in good American pluralistic fashion we come to the end now and
the title for the end is a pair of questions where we've been where are we going and my
epigraph for this concluding lecture comes from yet another American poet Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
in a poem called I am waiting says I am waiting for rebirth of wonder in Sophie's choice
the novel by William Styron that played an important part in the previous lecture among
the best moments that sting go and Sophie enjoyed was an outing to Coney Island
indeed the novel ends with stinko waking up here on the Atlantic shore where so much
of the American dream began not long after stinko pronounced that morning excellent
and fear the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the 1955 poems that became his book a
Coney Island of the mind still active today Ferlinghetti was one of the dominant voices in
the so-called beat generation of the 50s and 60s leading a rebellious literary movement
from his haunts in San Francisco he wanted to free people from the conventions of
business as usual replete with their suburban trappings and political power plays in the
poem I am waiting which is arguably the best poem in a Coney Island of the mind
Ferlinghetti uses irony wistfully humorously sardonically he wants to cross the great
divide of in congruency between what America is and what it ought to be anticipating
the arrival of what he calls a reconstructed Mayflower he also watches for the day that
make us all things clear Ferlinghetti's expectation is anything but passive non-activity
restless and insistent I am waiting is paradoxically a pilgrimage an odyssey of self-
discovery in verses meeting with hope that the atomic tests show and willing for things
to get worse if eventually they do get better some would say those desires are futile like
expecting the fleeing lovers on the Grecian urn to catch each other up at last and
embrace Ferlinghetti quarrels with such realism he concludes by awaiting perpetually
and forever a renaissance of wonder such wonder can help Americans arrived where
his poem begins looking within for someone to really discover America and whale but to
whale Ferlinghetti style is not to yell hysterically the USA's number one nor is it to intone
the gaggle of vacuous clichés and pious platitudes that rush so thoughtlessly from the
mouth of e.e. cummings 1926 counterpart to Archibald McLeish's orator both of whom
we've heard before in the series Cummings does not make explicit the occasion for the
banalities uttered by his speaker in next to of course God America I Memorial Day or
Veterans Day however seems more likely than the Fourth of July for this poem is an
ironic tribute to those who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter himself a veteran of
World War I coming sets forth the incoherence of a patriotism that sends the nation's
youth to die and then compounds the waist by claiming that nothing could be more
beautiful than these heroic happy dead such blindness is a reason to lament in grief and
Ferlinghetti joins Cummings doing both but that whaling is not the end unmasking the
pretense hurting through the pathos tragedy and irony during as Ferlinghetti puts it for
the American people to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right both
Ferlinghetti and Cummings peer to Wayland jazz duet that soars above the blues that
learning can be felt not only through our history but even now however much the
American dream may be in question it still remains alive but how much and how well
alive depends on where we are going as well as on where we have been some 10 years
before Sophie's choice appeared William Styron published another controversy on novel
this time called the confessions of Matt Turner which he described as a meditation on
history one of the most poignant scenes in that tale of an American slave uprising in
1831 comes near the end that scene features in exchange between that Turner in his
confessor a man named Thomas Gray the two men evaluate the rebellion success and
failure Gray acknowledges that Nat Turner the rebellions religiously driven charismatic
leader scared the entire South into a condition that may be described as will not ship
was he says well he goes on to say he was a success all right up to a point mind you up
to a point because Rev. basically speaking and in the profoundest sense of the word he
was a flat asked daily a total fiasco from beginning to end in so far as any real
accomplishment is concerned Nat Turner says little in reply his silence however is not
INSPIRON feels net Turner's mind this way but Mr. Gray I found myself wanting to say
what else could you expect from mostly young men deaf dumb and blind crippled
shackled and hamstrung from the moment of their first baby squall on bear clay floor it
was prodigious that we come as far as we did that we nearly took Jerusalem soon after
Turner stood trial for his life in Jerusalem Virginia he was found guilty and executed by
Styron's reckoning these last days were in November that month is of special
importance for the American dream because in that autumn season Americans not only
honor those who have died in war but they also hold their major elections later in the
same month they also celebrate Thanksgiving a national holiday which traces back to
the 17th century programs and which is second only to the Fourth of July in the infection
but most Americans have for it those special days give Americans an opportunity to
meditate how far has the United States, how near is it to Jerusalem these eight lectures
have explored some American myths and some American realities by focusing on the
American dream to be an American it seems is to reckon with that dream such is the
Americans heritage if there is truth in that proposition however it is crucial to identify
assumptions that could undergird a worthwhile American dream in the 1990s and
beyond in the time left in this final lecture of our series I would like then to summarize
where we have been by examining what some of those assumptions might be the
qualification Psalm is important for two reasons first philosophy reveals that one
premise invariably leads to another tracking them is an endless process second my
concluding remarks will deal mainly with psychological aspects we might call them of
domestic life in the United States far from ignoring international dimensions though
these reflections all imply that sound American dreaming must now take place in a
global village if there ever was a time when Americans can plan their future in isolation
they can no longer do so with impunity that fact coupled with vast American power
makes it urgent therefore to consider the seven suppositions that follow

and here's the first one at its core the American dream will continue to emphasize the
possibility of new beginnings but no longer connect emphasis rest on any simple
optimism about American life set at the turn of the 19th century in Sweetwater a small
town on the Burlington Railroad out in the prairie between Omaha in Denver Willa
Cather's brilliant novel lost lady is a story about this first supposition this is a truly
beautiful novel read it will gather my favorite American writers in this novelette really a
lost lady is when I recommend to you Capt. Daniel Forster Cather tells us was a railroad
man a contractor would build hundreds of miles of road for the Burlington over the
sagebrush and cattle country and on up into the Black Hills later he and his wife Marion
who is 25 years his younger came to preside over the Forrester place as everyone
called it a house well known for its charm and hospitality to the railroad aristocracy of
that time and special friends from the little town before time and circumstance conspired
to make Marion Forrester lost lady the Forrester place was often the scene of gay
dinner parties which the captain always gave the coast happy days he gave it cancer
says so that whoever heard him say it once like to hear him say it again nobody else
could utter those two words as he did with such gravity and high courage with his wife's
encouragement Capt. Forrester also like to tell their dinner guests his philosophy of life
namely but what you think and plan for day by day you will get because a thing that is
dreamed of in the way I is already an accomplished fact all are great West the captain
would continue as been developed from such dreams the homesteaders in the
prospectors and the contractors we dreamed the railroads across the mountains said
just as I dreamed my place on the Sweetwater deep inside the nation's heart strong
beats of hope like those can still be heard yet just as something forbidding could come
into Capt. Forster's voice along with his acknowledgment that there are people who get
nothing in this world I live too much in mining works in construction camps not to know
that the foundations of contemporary enthusiasm opportunity tomorrow better than
today boundless energy are somewhat shaky and perhaps endanger of being lost risks
are sometimes felt less as challenges to accept and Morris threats against which
Americans want protection styles of pleasure seeking may not reveal it but the United
States is much more conservative than it was in the 1960s and 70s the only sure thing
about social attitudes is that people change though not necessarily for the better it
seems clear that the United States has lived through the transition from optimism to a
realism that often borders on disillusionment today's Americans are neither in 1920s lost
generation more 1950s beat generation or even entirely what some sociologists have
recently called the me generation their condition is more ambiguous and ambivalent the
rhetoric about American self images is still confident and yet Americans have plenty of
reason for uneasiness about the future how did Americans get into this condition
countless factors emerge but one place to start is with some of the earliest American
dreams Puritans and Quakers dreamed of establishing God's new Israel in the howling
wilderness in some form the idea of America as a promised land were chosen people
could begin life anew has been part of the dream ever since these early settlers
however had no easy view of human goodness or divine providence the Puritans made
covenants aimed at righteousness the Quakers sought brotherly love but both groups
knew that created hatred were ever present threats to community life and that God's
justice could not be compromised with impunity Benjamin Franklin and Thomas P were
two influential spokesman who focused awareness on America's potential to provide an
example and leadership for the world they promoted dreams that still inspired on
Franklin's autobiography preached the secularized version of Puritan Quaker virtue
Council people to seek personal improvement to find the road to wealth and
consequently to power Franklin's urgings for the individual were supplemented by pains
exhortations to the colonies as a whole asserting that the cause of America is indeed
the cause of all mankind pain made the American Revolution morally imperative later as
Americans prospered materially expanded geographically flourished with their
democratic ideals they were only too happy to preserve and to extend these early
visions of America's especially favored status in recent times some American fortunes
at least have turned Americans have not lost a sense of uniqueness but there is less
certainty about how to define it partly because Americans realize better the talk about
new beginnings is easy but actually to make them is far more difficult than the American
dream has often inclined without a sense of the possibility of new beginnings there can
be no American dream the struggle is to see how they can and cannot be achieved in
late 20th century America which is still in its peculiar ways howling wilderness far distant
from Sweetwater

second the American dream rests upon the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution but no longer can it be assumed that American democracy can meet every
expectation that may be placed upon it Americans have always harbored something of
a suspicion of government if not of each other but even when suspicious most of them
have believed that the political institutions of the United States are unrivaled these
institutions most Americans are convinced help to fulfill the promises of human nature
by providing equal opportunity freedom and justice for all too many Americans then the
declaration and the Constitution are virtually sacred texts specifying independence and
representative democracy to safeguard and extend individual liberty they seem to bear
well the high expectations placed upon them in fact that dream is partly truth and partly
fiction Hamilton Madison Jefferson and the other founders were convinced that the
origin of the United States did constitute a landmark in political achievement still they
had rather few utopian sentiments the basic point remained clear to them life can be
nasty brutish in short independence and constitutional democracy notwithstanding they
saw the declaration and the Constitution not as guarantees of everyone's happiness but
only as giving people a chance for fulfillment too often later generations learn the
difference in recent times however the existence of that difference has become clear
again the difficulty is to see whether the American dream can orient itself between
expectations that are too much or too little

the third assumption that I think maybe worth thinking about is this the American dream
will still place a premium on the individual's pursuit of happiness but no longer can it be
easily expected that the communal good will thereby be enhanced Emerson believed
that he who would be a man must be a nonconformist and Thoreau insisted that the
only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do it any time what I think right these
teachers prodded America by teaching self-reliance and personal integrity in doing so
they encouraged unintentionally as well as intentionally the individual pursuit of
happiness that is so fundamental to the American dream they recognized that a variety
of goals and pass toward them would be chosen and on the whole they welcomed that
variety for it might forge the original relation to the universe that they sought for
American life if every person truly pursued his or her own way they thought the result
would not be chaos but rather creativity calm and serene it might not be a rich harmony
of interests could ensue granted Emerson and Thoreau added self-critical cutting edges
to the American dream they warned against the selfishness passive acceptance
corruption and slavery that could wreck their aspirations for the United States
nonetheless they may not have emphasize enough that even if those defects can be
removed there is no assurance that pluralism and diversity will not be costly for just as
noble aims can be many and virtuous so they can clash destructively partly because of
the prodding of their Emerson's and throws Americans take individualism seriously if not
the critique of it offered by those philosophers from Concorde thus if Americans hope
that individual pursuits of happiness will work together for the common good and if they
periodically make individual sacrifices so that public welfare is achieved too often the
top priority goes to a divisive me first point of view pushed far enough that disposition
can do the very American dream that grounds

forth the American dream will continue to insist that there are open frontiers and vast
opportunities to be seized but no longer can the future be regarded as unlimited big
business helped Americans to think that the sky was the limit although Marxists have
said that the profit motives of owner capitalists brutally exploit the vast majority of labor
those charges never convince the United States American industry and business
seemed able to produce wealth enough to make it clear that the path to upward mobility
was open to all affluence was a good to be highly prized moreover with hard work or
little luck and special privilege it was available to anyone humanized by deeper social
concerns it was thought America's Ebert position and resources technology and trade
would enable Americans at least at home to shatter the myth of scarcity and to eliminate
the plate of poverty Americans have always been shrewd and cost-conscious is just that
so much success sometimes lead to complacency if not blindness about the cost factors
obvious as well is hidden and social as well as financial that their transactions carried
with them nothing is free now that fact hit home with the realization that scarcities real
and the economic instability much of it fueled by greed can erode wealth as fast as
many individuals can accumulate today's costly demands for energy make claim that
almost everything Americans want to do is going to cost more and thus it is going to be
harder and harder to do everything they want to do that crunch necessitates wrenching
decisions for the cunning of history is conspiring to test the depth of Americans ability to
sacrifice and the quality of their social concerns

fifth the American dream will still stress both material success and at least the possibility
of moral progress but no longer can't assume that the two easily nurture each other
George Santiago wondered whether materialism or idealism was at the heart of
American character most Americans might answer both and in doing so they would
press the point that material success and moral progress Cannot often do go hand-in-
hand that perspective is not without credibility the United States has used its material
prosperity at least as well as any other human society to promote education to ensure
widespread participation in government intimate opportunity more than a cliché to that
extent achievement validates the dream even so American systems of education and
government have obviously not eliminated in flexibility unresponsiveness and inequity
moreover whereas American ingenuity industrial productivity and technological
expertise have raised standards of living for many people an increasingly ravaged
environment both rural and urban may prove to poisonous a price to pay material
success does not guarantee the highest qualities of life although it may be impossible to
have the latter without a good measure of the former the connections between the way
to wealth and the way to make life richer in its moral and spiritual dimensions are subtle
and not easily located or control if it is correct to say that both materialistic and idealistic
yearnings can be found at the base of American character the dilemma of their
relationships and priorities still haunts the American dream
sixth the American dream will continue to proclaim that all persons must be regarded as
fundamentally equal but no longer can Americans be innocently unaware of the irony
and complexity that are introduced into their lives by that claim American ideals
promised an open land and millions crossed oceans to seek opportunity these ever new
arrivals huge numbers of them brought here unwillingly as slaves kept building the
country but when established Americans began to see the newcomers as threats there
was great effort to restrict them nonetheless the nation grew but not without conflicts
about ethnic and religious groups as the trilogy film godfather reveals moreover
Americans learned that not every disembarking family was virtuous and civic minded
and of course the problem populations usually identified by skin color continue to be an
irritating presence to Nevis even when restricted to reservations or ghettoized in their
emancipation from enslavement added to these continuing complexities are ongoing
and even intensified concerns about the elderly women and children not to mention the
thousands of Mexican citizens who enter the United States illegally now every year in
some ways it seems that the nations motto ought to be reversed out of one many may
be more true today than out of many one granted there is little likelihood of secession
and civil war of the sort that bloody the the nation the country a century ago but there is
also little likelihood that Americans will all blend together harmoniously consider for
example John Kennedy's 1963 assertion that every American ought to have the right to
be treated as he would wish to be treated as one would wish his children to be treated
ironically all Americans can affirm Kennedys principal and in doing so actually make
their disagreements greater Kennedy offered his principal in defense of civil rights were
African-Americans but it is a two edge sword it can cut in the opposite direction
depending on how Americans view each other and how the fact wish themselves and
their children to be treated on that point they often family disagree witness the current
issue about abortion in the United States Americans are divided at times violently
between those who believe that abortion violates an unalienable right the life and those
who believe that to make abortion illegal is to deny a woman her right to liberty and the
pursuit of happiness the times will keep pushing the times out of joint on equally unless
Americans keep struggling to keep things together as we reckon with that fact it bears
remembering that the American dream originated in struggles over human rights and
true to its heritage the dream keeps that struggle in the forefront once separate but
equal was thought sufficient to guarantee the rights of African-Americans the dream
helped prove that clause insufficient to do so once women did not have the right to vote
the dream help them obtain it and it will continue to promote their quests for opportunity
and equality true laws do not automatically change attitudes or alter social and
economic realities the voices protesting the dream deferred attest to that paradoxically
though the very persistence of such voices suggests that the American dream is still
alive" Booker T. Washington WEP to boys and Martin Luther King Jr. were all
instrumental in exposing the myth that Americans black or white I without deep-seated
differences that can breed animosity and hatred I have a dream that one day this nation
will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed we hold these truths to be self-
evident that all men are created equal that was Kings hope Washington and Dboyt
shared it painfully before him the help to show the multiple ways in which attitudes of
superiority mistrust and selfishness undermine American proclamations about the
quality and create division instead in doing so however their voices did not relinquish
the dream instead its inspiration continues to nourish hope that by sharing and
understanding differences spirit of openness respect and equality can still be found

seven and last the American dream will still assert that human rights must be real but
no longer can it assume that the dream including the value it places on freedom of
choice and human rights is guaranteed to future let alone fulfillment in the world
speaking about American experience the historian James Trussell Adams wrote that the
epic loses all its glory without the dream the dream has placed a premium on the rights
to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness and from time to time Americans may have
had intimations of their dreams immortality within human history however no nation
seems to last forever and the threats that engulfed the world make us all Americans
included acutely aware of how fragile and vulnerable life liberty and the pursuit of
happiness can be it was prodigious said that Turner that we come as far as we did that
we nearly took Jerusalem what shall become of the American dream in the 1990s and
perhaps beyond power holds one of the keys to answer that question but everything
depends on who controls it what ends it serves and the means employed to pursue
them answers to those questions must be awaited anxiously meanwhile the American
dream hangs on in the wake of the Great Depression the American poet Archibald
McLeish worked with a set of photographs that documented devastation of American
ground during the 1930s the original purpose explained McLeish adventure write some
sort of text to which these photographs might serve as commentary finding in them
vividly what he named his stubborn inward living this McLeish reversed that plan and
produced not a book of poems illustrated by photographs but a book of photographs
illustrated by a poll McLeish called the book land of the free this is another one of my
recommendations to your beautiful book the photographs were ones that were taken
during the dust bowl agent during the time of the cutting of timber in Michigan and
Wisconsin and they portray a rather devastated kind of land and McLeish took these
photographs composed a poll to go with them he called the poll on the soundtrack for
the pictures the final page of this book called land of the free pictures the face of a
wizened old man torn his soiled suit worn he does not have it made and yet he's looking
squarely at the camera jaw set unsmiling eyes gleaming apparently he's asking
questions and they are not without discouragement but no one would confuse his
expression with despair it's got too much insistence to much resistance to much wonder
and determination for that like features of the old man's face the closing lines of this
poem that McLeish called the soundtrack wonder if the liberty is done the dreaming is
finished we can't say we aren't sure we don't know where asking McLeish's verse does
not exude optimism and yet the yearning and wondering of his lines finally expressed
either despair nor lack of courage and morale to continue McLeish apparently feels the
urge for renewal for a new beginning if one can be made and he understands that such
feelings may run deepest not when times are placid and all seems well but rather when
events have disoriented one sense of direction so with McLeish's poem sounds a
somber note when that should rightly sober all shallow American self-confidence it may
still be an apt prelude for the rebirth that Americans need having outlined those seven
suggestions about assumptions to help govern American dreaming in the future our
time in the series is nearly at an end but permit me please just a few more closing
remarks to sum up a little differently the mood I hope these lectures have engendered a
mood that can perhaps be instructive to recall as we go our various but interdependent
American ways Ronald Reagan whose path from small-town Midwestern radio
announcer to Hollywood movie star the president of the United States embodied in
American dream itself Ronald Reagan liked to call up John Winthrop's Puritan image of
America as a city on a hill he was also fond of Thomas P 18th-century dream that we
Americans could begin the world over again in the 1988 presidential campaign although
it's a long time back you may recall Michael Dukakis is Labor Day speech when he
stood in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and announced that he was a product of
the American dream and when George Bush sketched his picture of 1000 points of light
images of the dream or once again not far behind contrast rhetoric of that kind with
words whose inspiration is not American but French instead song from which they come
is part of the musical version of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables which I've referred to
earlier the words are some fairly early in the production by woman life is not treated
kindly her name is fine team and her lament is worth remembering I had a dream she
sings my life would be so different from this hell I'm living so different now from what it
seemed now life is killed the dream I dream having things go wrong in ways akin to
Fontaine's experience is an American reality to there are many in our land and in those
places affected by the American dream with as much injustice as Feinstein encountered
discover that their dreams cannot be that there are storms we cannot weather and that
life kills dreams studs Terkel whom we had met before as worried along those lines his
1980 sequel to American dreams lost and found is called the great divide second
thoughts on the American dream summing up more interviews he found too many
unhealthy riffs races religions that hasn't have-nots all are split more than they were a
decade earlier he found lamenting an increased collective amnesia as he called it a loss
of contact with our past Turco also detected in urine for belief that hearing however
does as much to widen the great divide as it does to Bridget America may not be blown
up says Turkel but an equally grim scenario seems possible polluted air polluted water
it's going to be death by strangulation he writes the overall detritus of banality will
overwhelm and yet even though aspects of the American dream are nightmarish there
is considerable evidence and rightly so that we Americans have not abandoned the in
the possibility of new beginnings or for that matter in the American dream as a whole
Terkel himself provides an example great though the divide may be as he appraised
second thoughts about the American dream at the end of the 1980s he takes heart in
the fact that there are more grassroots activities today he says than ever before in our
history insisting that there's got to be a change the ads I think it's happening I hope if
you could coalesce all those little groups Goliath has the networks and channels in
certain newspapers but we got the slingshot Terkel has allies the periodic popularity of
books such as Charles Reich's the Greening of America or William least heat Moon's
blue highways a journey into America help testify to that a 1970s version of the myth of
America as an Eden Reich's version predicted that the American consciousness would
transform itself into a new openness a new honesty a new awareness of individual
worth that is less competitive and cooperative some current trends indicate that many
Americans still share Reichs hopes for rebirth of their personal lives if not for the life of
society at large the body feeling head for the gym a weight control program or the latest
thing in cosmetic surgery the psyche disintegrating try a new age religion see a
therapist will put Humpty Dumpty back together again or if you can afford therapy via
self-help book and do the job yourself experiencing dark nights of the soul when as F
Scott Fitzgerald said it is always 3 o'clock in the morning become a born-again Christian
or transcendental meditator or go out of the now all too much for us complexity back to
the land on a communal farm less optimistic than Reich and persuaded that there was
no quick or the inevitable fix for his nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing
suspicion that I live in an alien land William least heat Moon Chuck his Missouri routine
on the last night of winter took to the back roads in a van named ghost dancing and
looped America from the heartland out and around searching for clarity and renewal this
half Anglo half Native American concluded by wondering in a season on the blue roads
what had I accomplished the log of heat Moon's journey answers in my own country I
had gone out had met had shared I had stood as witness the blend of change in
permanence he found was far from perfect yet it's hope was enough to keep him going
because as he stresses I sometimes heard human voices that showed the power not of
vision but of revision the power to see again and revise America obviously differs in
many ways from what it was 200 150 or even 10 years ago visions of some parts of its
dream had indeed been revised and other still need to be in at least one respect
however the country has not changed much at all and I think we should be glad of that
in spite of ironic disparities between ideals and realities enough good has happened in
this land for its vistas to empower still a dream that can inspire challenge and call us to
account as a people that fact confers responsibilities upon us at Willie Loman's funeral
near the end of Arthur Miller's play death of a salesman Willie's friend Charlie says a
salesman's got to dream toy it comes with the territory the same ought to be said of all
of us still state claims on American ground